While athletes are celebrated for doing the impossible physically, there has been growing recognition that athlete mental health has been greatly overlooked. Must well-being come at the expense of competition? What would sports look like if wellbeing and mental health were seen as integral to training, competition, and injuries? Efforts to transform sports culture will require diverse perspectives and frameworks.
In the first New School Athlete Mental Health & Wellbeing Symposium, we will bring together scholars, clinicians, and athletes from interdisciplinary, athletic, and personal backgrounds to discuss the status of athlete mental health and wellbeing across diverse contexts, obstacles and opportunities for engaging athletes in mental healthcare, how athletes and the media can work together to reimagine our expectations and representations of athletes and their wellbeing, and ways in which issues of equity and race-based discrimination negatively impact athletes.
We hope that this will be the first in a series of discussions that will help to chart strategies that will have positive impacts for athletes at every level of sport.
Schedule
11:00 AM ET: Olympic Athlete Panel
Featured Speakers: Kara Winger, Khalil Thompson, Kiira Korpi, Nicole Ross
Moderated by Chloe Sherrill
12:00 PM ET: Research & Athlete Support
Featured Speakers: Angel Brutus, Daria Schneider, Ivan Tchatchouwo Nzingha Prescod, William Parham
Moderated by Louisa Thomas
1:00 PM ET
Keynote Address: Alexi Pappas
Alexi Pappas is an Olympic runner and an award-winning actor and writer. Alexi’s memoir-in-essays, Bravey, with a foreword by Maya Rudolph, just came out in paperback and was the number 1 new release in both the sports and film categories. Alexi co-created and starred in the feature film OLYMPIC DREAMS alongside Nick Kroll, premiering at SXSW 2019. In 2016 Alexi co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in the feature film TRACKTOWN with a cast including Rachel Dratch (“Saturday Night Live”) and Andy Buckley (“The Office”). Alexi has been profiled on the cover of the New York Times Sports Page, in Rolling Stone, on NPR’s All Things Considered, and was also featured on the cover of Runner’s World Magazine’s 50th anniversary issue alongside Kevin Hart, named as one of the two faces of the “new boom” in running. A Greek-American, Alexi is the Greek national record holder in the 10,000 meters with a personal best of 31:36 set at the Rio Olympics. Alexi graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College and also ran for the University of Oregon as a 5th year, leading the team to two NCAA victories
1:30 OM ET: Q&A – All athletes
This event is presented by the Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab in the Department of Psychology at The New School for Social Research. Click here for the symposium website. Click here for time zone conversion.
