For former Carleton Ravens basketball player Krista Van Slingerland, taking care of athletes’ mental health is “a gap that universities across Canada need to fill.”
As the co-founders of the Canadian Centre for Mental Health and Sport (CCMHS), Van Slingerland and Natalie Durand-Bush are doing their best to be a part of filling up that gap.
The CCMHS was created last fall in response to what its founders perceived as a lack of resources available to deal with mental illness in university sport, compared to the vast assets dedicated towards maintaining athletes’ physical health.
“Carleton had the supports in place that every university across the country had,” Van Slingerland said, describing her own time as a Raven. “They were looking after our physical health, so we had really awesome athletic therapists and sports medicine physicians.”
“There was nobody in place that was solely looking after our mental health,” she added.
Van Slingerland said the centre, which has a physical location in Ottawa and a connected practitioner at Carleton, aims to combat mental illness with “practitioners from B.C. to Prince Edward Island.”
“We use a secure telehealth platform called Livecare to see athletes and coaches who are experiencing mental health challenges,” Van Slingerland said. “We assign practitioners to clients based on their needs and geography.”
The CCMHS boasts a network of 13 interdisciplinary practitioners from coast-to-coast, including one at Carleton. The practitioners can provide care either in-person or using the Livecare system. Many of them are bilingual, and all of them have “specialized areas,” according to Van Slingerland.
Carleton’s CCMHS practitioner is Lorena Ruci, a psychotherapist at the school’s Sports Medicine Clinic. While she and the CCMHS do hard work towards curtailing mental illness, the Bell Let’s Talk initiative—which donates five cents for every use of the hashtag #BellLetsTalk to raise awareness on mental health—continues to dominate media coverage on the topic.
The movement has even moved onto Carleton’s campus, with the women’s basketball and men’s hockey teams having hosted a “#BellLetsTalk night” on Jan. 19.
When it comes to addressing mental illness, student-athletes and coaches from across the province agreed that having a strong support network of teammates, coaches, and practitioners is key to a successful athletic environment.
“People have always been great on this team,” University of Toronto Varsity Blues basketball player Samantha Robertson said. “No one’s going to try to tear you down after a game, and everybody’s always supportive.”
“It’s great for varsity athletes, especially when there’s a lot of pressure on them,” she added.
For Ravens men’s hockey coach Shaun Van Allen, awareness about mental health has come a long way since his NHL playing days in the 1990s.
“We were called a lot of things back in the day, where coaches really got in our face,” said Van Allen, after his team’s win on their #BellLetsTalk night.
“You were told to keep your mouth shut and keep working,” Van Allen added. “There was nobody during my [NHL] career who came out and say they had a mental illness.”
For Van Slingerland, Bell Let’s Talk has become as a stepping stone towards making real progress in shifting the conversation about mental illness in a more accepting direction.
“In terms of reaching people on a national level, Bell Let’s Talk has been incredible for raising awareness,” Van Slingerland said. “Now, what are we going to do with all of that awareness, and all those funds raised?”
“I want to see boots on the ground, moving towards something tangible—that’s where the Centre really comes in,” she added. “We’re putting people in front of practitioners and connecting them with people who can actually help them, and not just talking about it.”
Photo by Jeff Pelletier
