The Cost of Winning: Mental Health, Cultural Competence, and Ethical Accountability and Responsibility in Sport and Performance Psychology

Sport and performance psychology is experiencing rapid growth alongside unprecedented complexity. This program intends to address critical gaps in psychology’s ability to ethically and competently serve athletes of color, particularly athletes with black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) identities, amid rapidly shifting cultural, economic, and performance landscapes. Across collegiate, Olympic, and professional sport environments, psychologists are increasingly called upon to manage complex mental-health needs, including racialized trauma, performance anxiety, identity disruption, and suicidality, yet the field continues to lack sufficient training, supervision, and workforce diversity to meet these demands. These dynamics reveal not only a cultural gap, but a field-wide ethical gap in competence, preparation, and public protection. As the field confronts rising mental-health distress, elevated suicide rates, amplified media scrutiny, a post-COVID rise in anxiety, depression, and self-harm across sport, and escalating stressors linked to name, image, and likeness deals and the House Settlement in collegiate sports; the need for culturally competent, well-trained practitioners has become an urgent disciplinary priority. This program also includes discussion encouraging participants to generate policy recommendations, research needs, and action steps to strengthen ethics-driven, culturally responsive practice within Division 47 and the broader field of psychology.

• Evaluate ethical and competency risks associated with current training and credentialing structures in sport and performance psychology.
• Differentiate culturally responsive, trauma-informed sport psychology practices from Eurocentric performance models.
• Apply integrated care principles involving psychology, social work, psychiatry, and lived experience to athlete mental-health cases.
• Critique existing workforce and supervision pipelines and identify strategies for inclusive, ethical reform.