Athletes’ perspectives on help-seeking for mental health

Brown, Kirsty R ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9403-1593 (2024). Athletes’ perspectives on help-seeking for mental health. University of Birmingham. M.Sc.

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Abstract

This thesis has multiple aims with the overarching goal of advancing the athlete mental health help-seeking literature. Specific aims include: 1) highlighting the benefit of utilizing conceptual help-seeking frameworks to aid a help-seeking research project, 2) conducting the first scoping review on the athlete help seeking literature to map the current literature base on athletes’ perspectives on help-seeking, and 3) show the benefit of using patient and public involvement (PPI) to produce a protocol for a qualitative study. Chapter 1 provides a background to the literature and shows the need for a scoping review to be conducted on the help-seeking literature. The scoping review presented in Chapter 2 is an overview of the literature on athletes’ access, attitudes, and experiences of help-seeking for mental health and highlights current gaps in the literature and recommended future research directions. Chapter 3 reports on the use of PPI using the Guidance for Reporting Involvement of Patients and the Public 2 (GRIPP2) short form, including the methods taken, the impact of PPI on the project, and how it led to the development of a protocol for a qualitative study. Chapter 4 fulfills several of the recommended research directions by describing the protocol for a qualitative study on UK student-athletes’ experiences of help-seeking for mental health. This chapter outlines the methods aligned to a pragmatic approach and transformative paradigm that underpins this thesis, including the sampling and data collection and analysis. Chapter 5 provides a summary of this thesis and its novel contributions. Overall, this thesis contributes to the extant literature by showing that there are yet to be any studies investigating mental health help-seeking experiences in UK student-athletes. The use of PPI in conjunction with this review provided support for a qualitative study on this population group. Furthermore, the protocol for a qualitative study aligns with a growing open science agenda by detailing rationale for the study, methods to be used, and justifications of their use. The findings and outcomes of this thesis have implications for public health, sport governing bodies, and the higher education system particularly in supporting the mental health needs of athletes and the need for campaigns to encourage athletes to seek help for their mental health.

Type of Work:	Thesis (Masters by Research > M.Sc.)
Award Type:	Masters by Research > M.Sc.
Supervisor(s):	Supervisor(s) Email ORCID Cumming, Jennifer UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0001-5655-7842 Quinton, Mary UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0002-0636-6957 Tidmarsh, Grace UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0001-8833-1960
Licence:	All rights reserved All rights reserved
College/Faculty:	Colleges > College of Life & Environmental Sciences
School or Department:	School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences
Funders:	None/not applicable
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
URI:	http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/14983

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