Out of the nearly 8 billion people in the world, just 10,305 of them took part in the recent Tokyo Olympics as athletes.

Halle Hazzard was supposed to be one of them. She was a track and field athlete, who at the 2021 North American, Central American and Caribbean Athletic Association U23 Championships in Costa Rica earned a gold medal in the Women’s 100m and a silver medal in the Women’s 200m.

This summer, as she prepared to go to Tokyo in July, she got injured and withdrew from the Olympics. “It was really hard because it’s something I’ve been working for…like for a long time,” Hazzard said.

“But then, I knew that if I did go and I pushed it, and I injured myself further, what would my future look like as a track and field athlete?”

It was a painful blow, but Hazzard had years of experience with failure and planning for the future.

Beyond being a high school, collegiate and Olympic-level athlete, Hazzard is part of another group: high-performance athletes who wrestle with psychological problems.

Halle in the competition

“So when something like failure happens, you know, the depression and the anxiety, like it all comes flooding back at once,” Hazzard said. She believes that “those mental things” are playing a huge part in her athletic life.

Hazzard is far from alone in this. A three-year study of 465 collegiate athletes, which was conducted by a team of researchers led by Kean University’s Andrew Wolanin and Drexel University’s Eugene Hong, found that 6% of them met the criteria for significant clinical depression. Another 24% were considered concerning but not enough to warrant a formal diagnosis.

The situation is more extreme for professional athletes. Data shows that up to 35% of elite athletes suffer a mental health crisis, which may manifest as stress, eating disorders, burnout, or depression and anxiety, according to Athletes for Hope, a Bethesda, MD-based association that aims to educate, encourage and assist athletes.

Mental health and well-being is essential to being able to perform one's best professionally or in academics in relationships and in sports.

Sports psychologist Ashley M. Zapata has long worked with Division I collegiate, elite and professional athletes in Premier Sport Psychology. She said athletes come to her for different reasons.

“I see athletes who are coming to me because they want to improve sports performance, performance anxiety, maybe needing to increase confidence or self-esteem, having negative intrusive thoughts about their performance,” Zapata said.

“There are some athletes I see who just need a space to be validated, to be heard,” Zapata added.

She emphasizes the importance of motivation, encouragement and energy in her work with athletes to optimize performance, whether that be in sports or in daily life.

Data from Athletes for Hope also indicates that female athletes are almost twice as likely as male athletes to show clinical symptoms of depression—especially if their sport of choice is track and field.

Zapata said tennis athlete Serena Williams getting angry or being emotional rightfully is criticized as being unprofessional, even though she's incredibly professional. But male tennis players who literally break rackets out on court are looked the other way.

“There's a disparity between what a female athlete is allowed to show and what a male athlete is allowed to show. And I think that goes back to just unfair and biased expectations of femininity and what that looks like and how that's portrayed in the sporting environment. So that's problematic,” Zapata explained.

Gabrielle Chenault has run track and field since she was 3 years old. She was on the team at Hampton University, a NCAA Division I school.

Chenault has dealt with anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia.

Body dysmorphia is a mental health disorder of people who can't stop thinking about perceived defects or flaws in their appearance — a flaw that is actually minor or that can't even be seen by others. But people who suffer from the disorder sometimes feel so embarrassed, ashamed and anxious that they may avoid social situations.

In Chenault’s case, she says, her fixation was on the ways she looked different from teammates, whether due to her height or size. “It’s not something I can clearly change but, you know, it was still stuck in my head because you just wanna fit in, I guess..... It sticks with you.”

Gabrielle Chenault and her teammates

She notes that there are many other causes for athletes’ psychological struggles.

“I want to say definitely anxiety, because track and field is a very intense sport,” said Chenault. “Especially when you do relays, you know basically, if you mess up, it could potentially cost your team a victory.”

That's why she put so much pressure on herself, and when she didn’t get the results she wanted, she would become depressed.

Chenault’s life was about more than running with the relay team in college. She was an athlete, a student, a resident assistant and the editor of the campus newspaper. As Chenault’s stress level increased, her anxiety and depression became stronger and more difficult to control.

“It was just getting too overwhelming,” she said.

When something goes wrong, change can be necessary. An instructor in the athletic office suggested to Chenault that she get therapy. At first, she saw it as an additional stressful responsibility — “this is just something else that I have to attend.”

But after the instructor spoke with her several times, it became very apparent to her that it was worth it.

Early in her first session in 2019, soon after sitting down, the therapist asked, Are you okay? “I just burst out crying because, you know, I just had been holding onto so much stress and so many emotions,” Chenault said.

Chenault said that therapy always brings up a lot of emotions. It not only relieves her pressures, but also helps her to discover her limits and accept herself and her body.

“You can work as much as you want, but you can’t change your body type,” said Chenault. “So just learning more to accept it rather than defend it is important.”

With the high-profile changes to mental health from police violence and the stress that can come with social activism, not to mention the pressures from competition, more athletes and teams are tapping into the expertise of sport psychologists.

More professional voices

Some of the world’s highest-profile athletes are being more open than ever about mental health and the pressures of competing. Top athletes like gymnast Simone Biles and tennis star Naomi Osaka have shared their struggles publicly, and inspired other athletes, including Hazzard and Chenault.

“No one would ever say it's a form of weakness to go to the hospital if your leg is broken,” Zapata points out. “No one would ever say that, and it's the same with regards to mental health.” She believes that the impact of big stars coming out about their own vulnerabilities is very powerful, especially for other women and young girls of color.

“I think they're both amazing athletes for doing what they did,” says Hazzard. “And I think in turn, they helped a lot of athletes and people because not everyone likes to open up about that kind of stuff. And I think they're inspiring more people to do that.”