Casper Ruud and Jessica Pegula led talks on Mental Health in Canada this week but is the sport truly committed to progress when it comes to tackling mental health?
A lot has been spoken in press conferences and public about mental health whether it’s player burnout or social media abuse.
It was during the grass court season where Alex De Minaur spoke about the impact that the schedule is having on players.
Meanwhile, Katie Boulter spoke about the vile abuse that she refuses on social media from people.
Questions have been raised as to whether society and tennis have the infrastructure to dealing with these problems head on.
There have been initiatives in improving players mental health but clearly there is still a lot of work to be done and that work has continued in Canada this week.
Two separate mental health forums were produced in both Toronto and Montreal which are dedicated to share light on mental health.
Speaking in Toronto Casper Ruud admitted that seeing a psychologist helped him as he spoke about his recent role in taking about mental health, “I had good experience talking with a psychologist and I felt like you go to gym with a public trainer to work on your fitness, but talking to a psychologist is sort of like working on your mental aspect in the same way,” Ruud told the ATP website.
“You work out your brain in a [way] and get your thoughts sorted and find a new way to motivate yourself so I just found it really helpful. I didn’t want to be a voice, but it felt like a natural thing to talk about these days and that I wanted to advise people if you are struggling or if you have issues or feel like you’re uncertain whether you should go talk to someone or not, I think it’s definitely a good thing to try and it really helped for me.”
Meanwhile in Montreal, Jessica Pegula opened up about the impacts of social media abuse with this being a common problem in tennis with bettors being the main culprits, “A lot of people don’t realize how many bad messages we get,” Pegula told the WTA website.
“And the irony is that it doesn’t matter if we win or lose. You have to have thick skin as an athlete, but it’s definitely becoming necessary to change our habits online, to use measures to filter out the negativity, and even to turn off comments during tournament weeks.”
The progress being made has been significant according to coach Craig Boynton who compared to what it was like back in the 1990’s, “In the ‘90s, this was a very taboo subject. It was that you didn’t talk about mental health. If you did, it was a weakness. So it’s been interesting to watch this progress throughout the decades,” Boynton told the ATP website.
“People would start to talk about it, but in the shadows. They would talk about it, but they would hold it tightly, because they didn’t want to be judged. And then as life has progressed and these tennis players [have progressed, people] are talking about them as people.”
Progress is being made at a significant rate but it’s clear that more infrastructural changes are required in order to make change for the players that can also impact the society around them.
At this week panel events, the WTA Foundation and ATP Serves campaigns have donated 10,000 dollars each to the Canadian Centre for Mental Health and Sport.
