Mental health issues a major concern for Canadian athletes amid COVID-19

Melissa Humana-Paredes finds comfort on the eight-by-eight-metre half of a beach volleyball court. Feeling the soft sand underfoot, the world champion begins to mentally decompress.

But since COVID-19 shuttered sports around the world, Canada’s elite athletes have lost access to courts, gyms, pools and tracks — the places they’d always been able to count on to find relief in tough times.

“The ability to just be able to go outside to a beach for a couple hours a day, that is my release. When I’m inside my court, inside my box, that’s my mental health time, that’s my me time, that’s when I get to decompress from the rest of the world,” Humana-Paredes said. “I don’t have that escape anymore.”

The 27-year-old from Toronto won gold with partner Sarah Pavan at last year’s world championships. The two would have been medal favourites at this summer’s Tokyo Olympics before the coronavirus brought global sport to its knees. Not only have the Games been postponed to the summer of 2021, but this season’s world beach volleyball tour has been scrapped. 

In the aftermath of the Olympic postponement, retired American swimmer Michael Phelps stressed the importance of mental health, telling NBC that “I really, really hope we don’t see an increase in athlete suicide rates because of this.”

The winner of 23 Olympic gold medals told The Associated Press: “As athletes, we’re so regimented. At this point, all the work is done. We’re just fine-tuning the small things to get to this point. Now it’s like, ‘Oh … we’re not competing.’ All these emotions start flaring up.”

Several national sport organizations — both the Canadian Olympic (COC) and Paralympic Committees (CPC), Own the Podium, the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute Network, the Canadian Centre for Mental Health in Sport, and Game Plan — have joined forces on a mental health task force to help athletes emotionally navigate this uncharted territory. 

The task force will develop and consulting and counselling plans that will be offered across numerous platforms such as webinars to athletes, coaches and team staff.

Karen MacNeill, the COC’s lead mental performance consultant, said part of the mental health issues around coronavirus stem from the fact it’s something athletes have never had to face. 

“There’s no playbook for this, right?” she said.

The unpredictability and lack of an end date are troubling. At least with an injury or a maternity layoff, athletes have an approximate timeline for return.  

“Whereas we don’t know what (a return) looks like, it’s a moving target, and it’s dependent on not only on what we do, but what our country does and what the world does,” MacNeill said. “So there’s a lot of variables that are out of our control.

“And so we have to really go back to focusing on what’s in our control.” 

Humana-Paredes said the few days around last month’s Olympic postponement were the most difficult.

“I just got really anxious and I wasn’t pleasant to be around — you can ask my boyfriend (Canadian rugby sevens player Connor Braid),” she said. “I was just on an emotional roller-coaster. I’d be crying. I’d be upset. I would be frustrated. I would be lost.”

Humana-Paredes and Braid, who’ve both qualified for Tokyo, are living together in Victoria, which she said helps. The couple has set up a work-out area in the living room. But she misses the separation of roles and spaces.

“I know who I am on the court, I know who I am off the court, I know who I am in the gym, and I know what my purpose is, and I know what my goals are,” she said. “Just not having that distinction between that — because my living room is now my gym, and I don’t really have access to the beach — I don’t have those lines anymore to kind of help balance out my life and dictate what my day will look like.”

Two-time Olympic trampoline champion Rosie MacLennan said an athlete’s loss of sports is similar to what the general population is feeling: it’s grieving the loss of what was normal, and stress-caused uncertainty.

“It’s almost like anticipated doom,” said MacLennan said. “And there’s no clarity on when there will be some aspect of normalcy again; or realistically, we will have to trudge a path towards a new normalcy or new normal.

“It’s really difficult to manage uncertainty, I don’t think humans are really hard-wired to manage it well. And then compound that with any financial struggle, a lot of people are experiencing loss of income and jobs. And with that comes like a loss of identity too.”

Alysha Newman, the Canadian record-holder in women’s pole vault, said athletes focus so completely for months on end for one or two shining moments — the Olympics or, in track and field, the Diamond League. Cancelling the entire season was a proverbial rug pulled out from under athletes, who were left to ask: What now? What’s the point?

“And then it’s like a full blown ‘Holy, this is way bigger than track and field,’ and in my world, track and field is everything,” Newman said. “And now, I think ‘All right, we have to have the (2021) Olympics because there’s no way that this is going to last forever. But we don’t know that.

“Every so often it will come up in my head, like, ‘What if this keeps going for more than a year?’ It’s hard, definitely really hard, but I try not to think about it. Because it’s so out of our control.”

Indeed, the severity of the pandemic and the rising death toll has raised questions around whether the Olympics will even be feasible 15 months from now.

The loss of structure is difficult for athletes, who are accustomed to having their days, weeks and even months carefully scheduled into training blocks.

Loss of income affects athletes. While many receive a monthly stipend through Sport Canada’s Athletes Assistance Program — a senior “card” is worth $1,765 per month — athletes also rely on appearance fees, prize money, and sponsorship dollars. Many athletes also need part-time jobs to pay the bills. Those jobs might no longer exist.

Loss of fitness can be a big psychological blow to an athlete.

“I’ve seen changes in my strength and lean muscle mass. Which I worked really, really hard for to peak (in Tokyo) four months from now,” Humana-Paredes said. “That’s just kind of dejecting sometimes. I just see all this work that I put in, and I’m trying hard to keep it, but it’s just not the same.”

On the plus side, athletes are constantly dealing with adversity. They’re trained to adapt to anything thrown at them.

“The coolest thing is athletes and high performance populations are very well set up because they’ve done the mental fitness training, they’ve done some of the resilience training,” said MacNeill, who played field hockey at the international level for a decade. “At the same time, they can be quite vulnerable given they’re driven towards that one goal which was four months away, and now it’s almost 16 months away. So that can change in the motivation and that sense of purpose.”

Canada made a bold move in announcing it would not send a team to Tokyo unless the Olympic were postponed to next year. As part of the COC’s athletes commission, MacLennan played a key part in Canada’s decision-making.

After the Olympics were postponed, MacLennan’s mom called the gymnast to remind her of her grandfather. Lorne Aldon Patterson, also a gymnast, would have competed at the 1940 Summer Games in Tokyo, but those Olympics were cancelled due to World War II.

“When you put it all in perspective it does make it easier, or at least logical,” MacLennan said.

She said the angst is eased somewhat by the fact that not only Canadian athletes, but all of Canada, is in this together — “the broader Team Canada, and that’s 37-plus million people, trying to work together to overcome this virus, and doing the right thing and doing what we can to help do our part.”

MacNeill said her key message to athletes, and something Canadians in general can draw from in these troubled times, is to accept and validate the emotional reaction. And then focus on what is controllable.

“It’s really seeing the emotions as part of the human (reaction), and not letting it be a director, so if I’m feeling a high level of anxiety and need to over-function and go buy all the toilet paper, see it rather as data, it’s informing me of what I need, and what’s important to me,” MacNeill said.

“You have a choice in terms of, you can be pushed around by your emotions, or you can choose: what’s my brand, what’s the role model (I want to be), how do I want to show up in this circumstance? And what can be transferable to all individuals is control the controllables, right? We can’t control that fact we don’t know where this is going.

“But . . . it’s a great time to double down on boosting mental and physical health practices. And then in terms of your training, rather than (focusing on) what’s taken away from me, looking at: what can I do in this moment.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 14, 2020.

Lori Ewing, The Canadian Press