Dealing with Mental Health with Sports Psychologist Eugene Oppelt

 Are mental health issues only for high performers or does everyone suffer from mental health issues?

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How can you use sport to assist kids with mental health issues? Are you and your team able to deal with the pressures on the field? What is Mental Health? Do only to athletes face the pressures on the field? Has the lockdowns had an affect on athletes and coaches? How do you deal with various issues on the field of play? Mental Heath has been in the news quite often in decent times with international sports stars coming out and talking about what they have gone through and how they dealt with it. When Marcus Trescothick spoke about his difficulties in 2006 which led him to withdraw himself from the English cricket team and eventually retire from international cricket, mental health was still considered something that you don’t talk about. This is stigma still persists but it is finally breaking loosing its stigma as a taboo subject. According to the U.K. Surgeon Journal (1999), mental health is the successful performance of mental function resulting in productive activities, fulfilling relationships, being able to adapt to change and cope with adversities. These are things that we all deal with on a daily basis and no one is immune. So how do we deal with it? How can we turn certain situations into a positive and get results from them? How do we help ourselves, other coaches and our athletes? Eugene Oppelt is a Consulting Psychologist that works with elite athletes and teams across South Africa, including the Stellenbosch University’s Maties Sport High Performance programme. He dealt with questions around mental health, creating a high performance environment, working with all kids and not just top athletes and finally the effect of the coronavirus on kids and their return to school and playing sport. Sport is not only a place where kids have mental health issues, it is also a place where mental health issues are dealt with and there are programs in place to assist kids with dealing with life’s problems.