At 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.
