At a timewhen the public discussion of mental illness in society is reaching a highpoint, athletes and other sports insiders remain curiously silent about theirprivate battles with a range of mental illnesses. While a series ofprofessional athletes have exposed the deep, dark secret related to thepervasiveness of mental illness in high performance sport, relatively little isknown, sociologically, about what mental illness culturally means inside sport.
This editedcollection showcases research on how sport, as a social institution, mayactually produce dangerous cultural practices and contexts that foster thedevelopment of mental illness within athlete groups. Further, chapters alsoillustrate how sport, when organized with sensitivity and care, may serve tohelp manage mental illnesses. Rather than analyzing mental illness as anindividual phenomenon, contributors to this volume equally attest to how mentalillness is socially developed, constructed, managed, and culturally under
