Carleton students take new, grassroots approach to mental health in student-athletes
A big theme throughout the pages of the Ontarion this school year has been mental health awareness. From articles on anxiety, to preventative measures the football team is taking to thwart concussions, to the debate on a fall reading week and steps taken to stay mentally fit, editors and volunteers have highlighted the ongoing efforts being made on campus and across Canada to prevent and treat mental health disorders.
Recently, two Carleton students, Krista Van Slingerland and Samantha DeLenardo, have garnered national attention with their grassroots Student Athlete Mental Health Initiative (SAMHI), and once again brought mental to the forefront of conversations on the evolution of sports.
The campaign launched on Twitter and Facebook on Friday, March 14, and according to Van Slingerland, the amount of positive feedback she’s been receiving from friends, family, and athletes had been so overwhelming, she woke up crying with joy for a week.
The women addressed the issues around the clichéd sports phrase, “be mentally tough.”
“I wouldn’t say there’s something inherently wrong with [the phrase]…but growing up an athlete, it is something that we are always striving to build – that mental toughness, which means the ability to perform under pressure consistently, and to come back from an injury or battle through an injury,” commented DeLenardo, a former varsity hockey player for Carleton now writing her Master’s thesis.
It’s this constant pressure and incessant anxiety to perform that drove Van Slingerland, a varsity basketball player at Carleton, to take a hiatus from the sport she loved after finding herself taking antidepressants and entering a really “dark” time in her life.
“I was having trouble sleeping, I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want people to touch me, and so you can imagine how difficult it was to compete at a high level in a very physical game when I was just – I was not happy, and I was definitely not healthy,” said Van Slingerland.
The former Ravens basketball player believes if a program like SAMHI was in existence when she was playing, her drastic decision to leave a sport she’d been playing since grade two wouldn’t have happened.
“If I had felt that it was okay to have a mental illness and that it didn’t compromise my mental toughness…I could have continued to play, and that is really what SAMHI is about: let athletes play the sport they love through mental illness,” continued Van Slingerland.
While the support for such an initiative has been overwhelming to date, the two women are in the process of seeking funding for their project, which is still in its infancy. “Funding would pay for a centralized mental health e-website that’s tailored for student-athletes,” concluded DeLenardo.