While the tennis champion Naomi Osaka has put the issue of the mental health of athletes back to the heart of the debates, sports psychologist Elise Anckaert recalls on Europe 1 that they have often grown up with a great demand for performance, which makes it even more taboos potential weaknesses and does not help athletes stop when necessary.
INTERVIEW
His speech brought to light a subject more and more evoked in the world of sport, but which is still often taboo. At Roland Garros, Japanese champion Naomi Osaka refused to participate in the tournament's press conferences in order to preserve her mental health, and explained that she experienced periods of depression after her victory at the US Open in 2018. And in her image , more and more athletes have recently publicly assumed that they have experienced mental health problems. Invited Sunday in Europe 1, Elise Anckaert, clinical psychologist and sports psychologist at Insep, recalls that athletes can have all the more difficulty admitting their weaknesses as they are often built in an obsession with performance .
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For this specialist, it is not surprising that athletes can, like everyone else, see their mental health weakened.
"The quest for perfection for athletes is still a perilous path," she explains.
"They usually start quite early, and are built with a very particular relationship to performance ... They play a self-esteem in their relationship to performance, they are exposed. This can weaken and test their health."
Athletes "don't always know how to say stop"
"The athlete is sometimes a little 'objectified'", adds Élise Anckaert.
"You can see it in his relationship to performance… It's as if he doesn't have the right to be in poor health because he's tired, because he has more mental energy."
However, insists the psychologist, "sportsmen have enormous demands on themselves, and these are factors which can cause a moment when it is the moment to stop".
Problem: these top athletes "do not always know how to say stop".
Also, Elise Anckaert insists on the importance of being well assisted by loved ones.
"The entourage is also responsible for protecting them from themselves when they can not do it," said the guest from Europe 1.
Citing the many people surrounding an athlete, parents, coaches, elected officials, federations, Élise Anckaert insists that the athlete "must be in psychological safety as well as his environment". And to conclude: "I find that it is very important to re-situate the responsibility of each one."