Mental health among athletes is a conversation that has picked up over the years, with several players opening up about their struggles. Many sports teams now have mental health directors. LaKeitha Poole, Ph.D., serves as an assistant mental health director in Louisiana State University’s Athletics’ unit, and she’s on the NFL mental health board.
Poole spoke with rolling out about July being Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, her role on the NFL mental health board, and helping athletes be as mentally healthy as possible.
What should we know about Minority Mental Health Awareness Month?
I think most people, when we think of different awareness months, we feel like they have these super long histories, but Minority Mental Health Awareness Month has only been around actually since about 2008. We’re not like several years in or decades in at this point on celebrating this. It came about as a result of a woman named Bebe Moore Campbell — who was an author, writer and journalist — and her daughter was struggling with mental health issues. She noticed exactly what I was just sharing even in my story of going this route as a career. Campbell [was] looking for services and resources for her daughter to the point where legal matters [were involved], and she had to figure out the best ways to try to get resources.
Campbell was living in Inglewood, California, and she ended up starting a National Mental Health Organization chapter there. She fought that battle for her daughter all the way up to Washington. In time, her name has [had renown] for many years prior to 2008.
So finally — as mental health has now become a little bit less of a taboo topic and a little bit more resource-based — it just became a priority at the congressional level. And they finally made it a month to celebrate. We try to take advantage of it because it was a long, hard-fought battle for Campbell to get there.
Why should we continue to talk about minorities’ mental health?
I think it just allows us to explore issues that — for many years and to some capacity still today — [reinforce] taboos or that there’s a lot of stigma still related to [mental health], like our mental health [not] being just as important as our physical health. A lot of times we sort of separate those and think if we have the sniffles or if we have some sinus issues, we’re going to go probably see the doctor when we wake up that day. For our mental health, we may wake up not feeling like ourselves or knowing that we’re going through something like grief, trauma, [or] loss. For whatever reason, we kind of just sit in that, and we’ll say, “Oh, it’ll pass,” instead of doing what most people would do if they had something physical going on — which will be to go check in with someone.
The whole month itself is just to bring awareness to the unique challenges that we face, particularly as racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S., and figuring out where people can get resources because that’s usually the hardest part. Once somebody decides to seek help, they don’t know where to go — or they can’t find someone that looks like them.
