Description
Book SynopsisAt a time when the public discussion of mental illness in society is reaching a high point, athletes and other sports insiders remain curiously silent about their private battles with a range of mental illnesses. While a series of professional athletes have exposed the deep, dark secret related to the pervasiveness of mental illness in high performance sport, relatively little is known, sociologically, about what mental illness culturally means inside sport.
This edited collection showcases research on how sport, as a social institution, may actually produce dangerous cultural practices and contexts that foster the development of mental illness within athlete groups. Further, chapters also illustrate how sport, when organized with sensitivity and care, may serve to help manage mental illnesses. Rather than analyzing mental illness as an individual phenomenon, contributors to this volume equally attest to how mental illness is socially developed, constructed, managed, and culturally understood within sport settings. The book highlights the relevance of a range of theories pertinent to the social study of mental illness including dramaturgy, cultural studies, learning theory, symbolic interaction, existentialism, and total pain theory. Chapters range from the discussion of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, drug addiction, epilepsy, mental trauma, stigma, the mass mediation of mental illness, and the promise of sport as a vehicle for personal and collective recovery.
Trade ReviewSociologists, social psychologists, and cultural psychologists collate and showcase what their fields have produced to date regarding mental health issues in sport. Among their topics are mental illness stigma, researching trauma in the context of sport, depression and suicide in professional sports work, invisible disabilities, the mass mediation of mental illness in sport, and in it for the long run: researching mental health and illness. -- Annotation ©2019 * (protoview.com) *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Mental Illness in Sport: Sociological Legacies, Absences and Controversies;
Michael Atkinson 1. Mental Illness Stigma;
Elizabeth Pike 2. Total Pain;
Kristina Smith 3. Mental Illness and Identity Intersections;
Julie Maier and Shannon Jette 4. Athlete Anxiety and Trauma;
Melissa Day 5. Depression and Suicide;
Andrew Smith 6. Disordered Eating;
Anthony Papathomas 7. Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction;
Catherine Palmer 8. Hidden Mental Illnesses;
Michael Atkinson 9. Media Representations of Mental Illness;
Kass Gibson and Paul Gorczynski 10. Healing and Emotional Recovery;
Ruth Jeanes, Ramon Spaaij and Jonathan Magee 11. Studying Mental Illness;
David Carless and Kristina Douglas
