Sport Psychiatry

For professionals and others involved in sports who want to better understand the innermost lives of athletes and to treat the complex problems that can arise from competition, this book provides both invaluable guiding principles and treatment specifics.

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For mental health professionals, sports medicine specialists, physicians, coaches, and other sports enthusiasts, Sport Psychiatry: Theory and Practice provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the psychological challenges and pitfalls of being an athlete. From Little League to the Olympics, it tracks the lives of athletes: their biopsychosocial development, family issues, drug use and abuse, mental disorders, performance issues, and treatment for these problems.

These essays unfold basic ideas about the athlete's mind, body, and social roles. In the telling, they reveal the psychological process of becoming an athlete, the complex interactions of endocrine systems during training and competition, and the perils for the psyche of an athletic career. Such perils include some of the fundamental clinical phenomena of sport psychiatry: the variety of mental illnesses among athletes, the abuse of drugs (including performance-enhancing ones), the problems endemic to youth sports, and the common difficulties encountered by athletes in training and competition, such as choking and slump. In response to these challenges, Sport Psychiatry: Theory and Practice explains how the basic evaluation and treatment modalities of psychiatry, including psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, family therapy, and group therapy, are adapted to the athletic context in sport psychiatry.