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Mental health lead: towards a new role within the athlete support team?

bjsports · 2026-05-05 · canonical JSON source

1 visible annotations · policy: published · automated confidence ≥ 75.00%

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Across high-performance sport, athletes, coaches and entourage members experience mental health problems at rates comparable to or exceeding those in the general population.1 2 High-performance sport organisations, therefore, have a crucial duty of care to safeguard and promote mental health. This responsibility is complex, multifaceted and necessarily shared across multiple stakeholders, including coaches, support staff, broader entourage members, organisational leadership and athletes themselves.3 In practice, organisational policies and strategies may span the full continuum of care,4 from initiatives that raise awareness and promote well-being, to detection and early intervention and referral to clinical treatment when needed. To address this broad challenge, scholars, practitioners and policymakers have advocated for the appointment of a new dedicated role within the athlete support team, which may be referred to as a Mental Health Lead (MHL) (different labels have been used to describe this role. However, we use Mental Health Lead to reflect the broad responsibilities to oversee and coordinate a wide range of mental health initiatives), to oversee and coordinate structural organisation-wide mental health initiatives.5–7