Dr. Mena Mirhom, MD, FAPA, Chief Wellbeing Officer, Athletes for Hope 

Reflections on the inaugural Athletes for Hope Athlete Mental Health Research Fellowship 

A decade ago, athlete mental health was largely a conversation we reserved for the aftermath of something gone wrong, addressed in the language of crisis and seldom before it, and in the years since it has moved much closer to the center of how we understand performance, recovery, longevity, and a life lived well both inside and beyond sport. International consensus statements from the International Olympic Committee, alongside a rapidly expanding body of research, have established a principle that once felt aspirational and now reads as plainly obvious, which is that mental health deserves the same infrastructure, rigor, and evidence base we have long reserved for physical health.^1–4 

That shift is genuine and worth celebrating, and yet it has surfaced a quieter problem of its own, because so much of the work that drives the field forward still unfolds in isolation from the rest of it, with researchers running their studies while clinicians deliver care, coaches shaping culture while public health professionals design interventions, and athletes carrying the lived experience that ought to anchor all of it, so that each group produces something genuinely valuable while very little of that value is ever built to connect to anything beyond itself. That gap between disciplines doing good work separately is the precise reason we created the inaugural Athletes for Hope Athlete Mental Health Research Fellowship. 

Building More Than a Fellowship 

When we launched the fellowship our ambition reached well beyond mentoring the next generation of researchers, because what we set out to build was an interdisciplinary community capable of advancing athlete wellbeing through scholarship, education, advocacy, and collaboration all at once, and the inaugural cohort reflected exactly that ambition. Our fellows included psychiatrists, psychiatry residents, physicians, psychiatric nurse practitioners, psychologists, neuroscientists, social workers, counselors, public health professionals, medical students, doctoral researchers, and master’s students, alongside former collegiate and professional athletes, with several arriving from training in kinesiology, sport psychology, neuroscience, health policy, and community mental health, and others bringing the firsthand experience of having competed at the highest levels of sport. 

That range of perspective became our single greatest asset, because no one discipline can fully explain mental health in sport when an athlete’s wellbeing is shaped at once by biology, psychological resilience, sleep, nutrition, injury, organizational culture, coaching relationships, identity, social support, and the transitions that punctuate every career, and improving outcomes therefore depends on our willingness to draw expertise from each of those domains together. Across the course of the year our fellows pressed on one another’s assumptions, traded perspectives drawn from their respective fields, and produced work that none of us could have completed on our own. 

Translating Science Into Practice 

One of the defining aims of the fellowship was to close the distance between research and the people it is ultimately meant to serve, because important findings too often remain locked inside academic journals and never reach the athletes, coaches, parents, and clinicians who stand to benefit from them most. Over this year our fellows built educational resources and scholarly work addressing some of the most pressing topics in the field, examining eating disorders in athletes, nutritional supplementation and performance, substance use, stress management, sleep, concussion awareness, injury prevention, seasonal affective disorder, and the stigma that still keeps many athletes from seeking the care they need, and that work appeared in Psychiatric Times, on the AFH Wellbeing platform, and through the Center for Athlete Wellbeing, carrying evidence out of academia and into practical guidance for the people who can act on it. 

The subjects ranged widely while the underlying conviction held steady throughout, which is that mental health belongs across the full arc of an athlete’s development and long before any moment of crisis. Sleep, to take one example, underpins emotional regulation, cognitive performance, and injury prevention in ways that give it a role in an athlete’s life far larger than recovery alone, while nutrition reaches well past fueling into body image, disordered eating, and psychological wellbeing, and concussion demands sustained attention to the emotional and psychiatric symptoms that so frequently follow the neurological ones. Stress, when it is recognized and regulated well, becomes one of the most important skills an athlete develops across an entire career, and taken together these topics describe athlete wellbeing as an interconnected system in which sleep, nutrition, injury, identity, and culture continually shape one another. 

Learning From One Another 

Some of the most valuable learning of the year happened well outside any formal lecture, in the monthly office hours that became a space where fellows worked through difficult clinical cases, debated emerging research, sharpened one another’s manuscripts, and wrestled with the harder questions facing the future of sports psychiatry, while quarterly lectures from nationally recognized leaders widened those conversations across medicine, psychology, neuroscience, public health, and athlete advocacy. The relationships that formed among these fellows, people who will go on to lead their respective fields, are what I expect to carry forward longest, even as the publications themselves are read and built upon in the years ahead. 

The Center for Athlete Wellbeing 

This fellowship also helped lay the groundwork for an effort that I believe represents where our field is genuinely heading, which is the Center for Athlete Wellbeing, an initiative whose vision is simple to state and considerably more demanding to build. The premise holds that research should inform education, that education should improve clinical care, that clinical experience should in turn generate the next set of research questions, and that athletes should remain full partners at every step of that cycle, so that scholarship, advocacy, education, and clinical practice operate together as one connected ecosystem built around athlete wellbeing, an integration that is increasingly recognized as what durable progress in mental health actually requires. 

What Comes Next 

Looking back on this first year, what encourages me most is the direction in which the work now points, because the broader conversation around athlete mental health has plainly matured, and the harder work that remains in front of us is the work of implementation. We will need to ask how we train clinicians who carry genuine expertise in sports psychiatry, how we place evidence-based mental health education directly into the hands of coaches, how we help organizations build cultures that protect wellbeing while sustaining the performance those organizations depend on, and how we design systems that move upstream to prevent illness well before an athlete ever reaches a point of crisis, and those are the questions that will define the next decade of this field. 

I am grateful to every fellow who brought their expertise, curiosity, and conviction to this inaugural year, because their work has strengthened Athletes for Hope, advanced the conversation within sports psychiatry, and built a foundation that future cohorts will go on to build upon for years to come. 

With that foundation now in place, applications are open for the 2026–2027 Athletes for Hope Athlete Mental Health Research Fellowship, and we are looking for graduate students, residents, clinicians, researchers, and early-career professionals who are ready to advance athlete wellbeing through research, education, advocacy, and the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that this first year was built to model. 

The future of athlete mental health will be built by teams, by the psychiatrists, psychologists, coaches, researchers, and athletes who are willing to bring their separate disciplines into the same room and create together what none of them could have created alone, and this inaugural year has shown me with real clarity what becomes possible when those teams genuinely come together, leaving me convinced that we are still only at the very beginning of this work. 

To apply for the fellowship send your resume and CV to fellowships@athletesforhope.org.

References 

1. Reardon CL, Hainline B, Aron CM, et al. Mental health in elite athletes: International Olympic Committee consensus statement (2019). Br J Sports Med. 2019;53(11):667-699. 

2. Rice SM, Purcell R, De Silva S, et al. The mental health of elite athletes: a narrative systematic review. Sports Med. 2016;46:1333-1353. 

3. Gouttebarge V, Castaldelli-Maia JM, Gorczynski P, et al. Occurrence of mental health symptoms and disorders in current and former elite athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Sports Med. 2019;53(11):700-706. 

4. Mountjoy M, Junge A, Bindra A, et al. Surveillance of athlete mental health symptoms and disorders: a supplement to the International Olympic Committee’s consensus statement on injury and illness surveillance. Br J Sports Med. 2023;57(21):1351-1360.