Athletes Cannot Out-Cope a Harmful Sport Culture
I came across an interesting new study posted to LinkedIn recently: Psychological Violence and Mental Health Outcomes in NextGen Athletes: Moderating Role of Mental Performance Skills by Lara Pomerleau-Fontaine and colleagues.
The researchers surveyed 318 NextGen athletes between the ages of 14 and 25, most of them based in Québec and developing toward national or professional competition. They looked at athletes' mental health, their experiences of psychological violence in sport, and their mental-performance skills — things like confidence, focus, emotional regulation, motivation, and self-talk.
A few findings stood out:
About one in five athletes reported anxiety symptoms serious enough to warrant further assessment. A similar share reported clinically significant depressive symptoms.
Psychological violence from peers was linked to more anxiety and depression and to poorer overall mental health.
Mental performance had the strongest relationship with athletes' mental-health outcomes. Athletes with stronger mental skills generally reported less anxiety and depression and better overall mental health.
These were screening results, not diagnoses, and we don't know how much the anxiety and depression groups overlapped. Still, one in five is hard to dismiss.
The study also found that 45.3% of athletes were flourishing, while only 1.9% were languishing. Someone could look at those numbers and conclude that most NextGen athletes are doing fine. That would misread what "flourishing" means. It refers to positive functioning — meaning, connection, supportive relationships, satisfaction with life — not the absence of anxiety or depression. An athlete can experience positive functioning while also experiencing clinically significant psychological symptoms. That distinction is especially important in high-performance sport, where athletes are trained — and rewarded — for functioning through discomfort and distress. Their ability to perform is not proof that they are fine.
What are we asking mental skills to fix?
In the study's main analysis, psychological violence from authority figures wasn't independently linked to anxiety, depression, or overall mental health. But a narrower relationship emerged once mental-performance skills were considered. When reported violence from authority figures was low, athletes with the strongest mental-performance skills also reported the least anxiety. However, the relationship between authority-figure psychological violence and anxiety was steeper among these athletes: those reporting greater violence also reported a sharper increase in anxiety scores than athletes with moderate or lower mental-performance scores.
The researchers can’t say why. They suggest these athletes might be more invested in their sport or more attuned to their own emotional responses—plausible, but unproven. The finding is also specific to anxiety and authority-figure violence rather than every outcome. What it suggests is that even exceptionally strong mental skills did not fully insulate these athletes from psychological harm.
I’m not saying mental skills are irrelevant or ineffective—the data here says the opposite. Athletes deserve access to professionals who can help them build confidence, regulate emotion, sharpen focus, and manage pressure. But what are sport organizations expecting those skills to accomplish? A resilience workshop or mental-performance intervention can give athletes valuable tools. It cannot fix a problem that begins in an unsafe environment. You cannot train an individual skill set that compensates for psychological violence, unchecked authority, or a culture where harmful behaviour has become normal.
Individual skills can support athletes. They cannot make an unsafe environment safe.
Not every athlete encounters the same environment
There's another question worth exploring, even though this study wasn't built to answer it: is every athlete equally exposed to harmful sport environments — or equally able to access support, report harm, or leave? Race, gender, disability, sexuality, and socioeconomic circumstances may all shape those experiences.
The 2021 Are We One? Ontario University Athletics Anti-Racism Report surveyed more than 5,000 OUA members and found that nearly half of racialized student-athletes had experienced racism during their time in the league. Racism isn't merely an unpleasant social experience — a systematic review and meta-analysis of 293 studies by Yin Paradies and colleagues found it's consistently associated with poorer mental health, including greater anxiety, depression, and psychological distress.
Financial resources may also shape an athlete's options. A well-resourced athlete can access private care or move to a different training environment. An athlete without that safety net may depend on sport for community, financial support, housing, or a pathway into postsecondary education — and reporting harm, or leaving, may carry a very different cost for them.
These inequities deserve more attention than I can give them here. But they reinforce why individual intervention can't be the entire strategy: a generic resilience program assumes athletes encounter similar environments, hold similar institutional power, and have similar resources when something goes wrong. They don't. At the postsecondary level, institutions have a particular opportunity to provide free, confidential, culturally responsive care — but that care has to exist alongside prevention, safe reporting processes, and accountability, not instead of them.
Individual support cannot replace environmental change
Mental-performance skills matter. This study makes that clear. But sport organizations, athletic departments, and sport leaders can't rely solely on individual-level interventions to solve problems produced by sport environments. You cannot teach an athlete enough positive self-talk to neutralize psychological violence. You cannot ask them to regulate their emotions on behalf of an unaccountable authority figure. And you cannot call a mental-health strategy complete if it helps athletes cope with harmful conditions while leaving those conditions intact.
The athletes most vulnerable within sport do not need to be taught how to tolerate more. They need environments that expose them to less harm — and care that understands who they are and what they're up against.
Research discussed, in order of appearance:
Pomerleau-Fontaine, L., Boudreault, V., Labossière, S., Durand-Bush, N., Maurin, J., Brassard, S., Parent, S., Dion, J., & Soulard, A. (2026). Psychological violence and mental health outcomes in NextGen athletes: Moderating role of mental performance skills. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.2025-0255
Joseph, J., Razack, S., & McKenzie, B. (2021). Are we one?: The Ontario University Athletics anti-racism report. IDEAS Research Lab, University of Toronto. https://oua.ca/EDI/anti_racism_report_2021
Paradies, Y., Ben, J., Denson, N., Elias, A., Priest, N., Pieterse, A., Gupta, A., Kelaher, M., & Gee, G. (2015). Racism as a determinant of health: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 10(9), Article e0138511. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138511