Mind Over Stigma: Rethinking Mental Health to Power Mental Fitness

When you think about mental health, what comes to mind? What images may you see? Perhaps a couch with an individual laid out discussing a recent divorce. Maybe you would say mental health is about not being depressed or anxious. But who helped you to that conclusion, and is it truly accurate? Over the last decade, the topic has shifted from taboo to mainstream, leading to misinformation and incorrect definitions of mental health and its related terms. 

What was once whispered in locker rooms or ignored entirely is now part of everyday conversations – from powerful student-athlete testimonials to widespread corporate initiatives – some helpful and some harmful. 

The dialogue around mental health is not only more frequent but also more open, signaling a cultural shift that’s long overdue. However, this attempt to understand it has also led to some misconceptions that are rooted in false and dishonest perspectives of the human body. 

Decades of Discredit: Mental Health Was Used as a Tool of Erasure

Throughout human history, people believed that those with mental health issues developed some kind of connection to an evil entity, oftentimes a demon or spirit, that caused them to be crazy or irrational.

These beliefs continued until the mid-1700s, as medicine began to evolve with technology, such as the introduction of the microscope and doctors washing their dirty, blood-covered hands before surgery. 

Some of the earliest explanations using physical symptoms of mental health began with the term “hysteria.” The word was used first by Hippocrates, a Greek physician from 460-370 BC. Hysteria was solely applied to women, who he believed suffered from a “wandering womb” that would migrate around women’s bodies, punching ovaries and bullying the organs, even affecting a woman’s mental health struggles. 

Hysteria was also used to explain the behavior of women in a wide variety of contexts, even in science, until the 1920s. For over 2000 years, hysteria was a convenient diagnosis to control women. 

Another term, Drapetomania, was used to describe a mental illness for slaves in the 1850s, based on the belief that slaves had it so good they had to be mentally ill to want to leave. 

Yes. Mental health has an evil villain origin story that would make even “The Joker” wonder if his origin story was horrible enough. But it's important to understand its origins, the impact on the population, and subsequent mental health efforts. But let’s take a deeper look at how this impacted mental health facilities.

White Coats, Dark Rooms: The Grim Legacy of Mental Health Facilities

The evolution of modern medicine has increased focus on the body and solving physical conditions. From these efforts came modern mental health, including insane asylums, lobotomies, and a host of other procedures that were often horrific. 

These treatments and mindsets caused permanent physical and psychological damage, as well as death, to many patients. Overcrowding and inadequate methods to care for insane asylum populations caused an increased use of psychotropics (oral medicines meant to affect the brain). 

By the 1960s, asylums had a well-earned reputation for gross treatment of humans that mirrored the treatment of lab rats and Dracula’s torture chambers. It would be this horrendous treatment that would uplift a movement toward community-based solutions – but very little changed in the mindset of how we approached mental health. 

The integration of Vietnam veterans marked a turning point. “Shellshock” was first used after WWI to describe the mental health issues that terrorized soldiers returning from the first modern warfare involving aircraft, tanks, and artillery. The psychological toll of Vietnam on military veterans, intensified by the use of weapons like napalm and Agent Orange, revealed a deeper issue that could persist for one’s entire life.

Now, with a better understanding of medicine and the human body, it became apparent that these wartime experiences were the result of a mind-body connection. By 1980, with advances in psychiatry, “shellshock” was redefined as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

Most modern mental health principles stem from the DSM, now in its 5th edition (updated in 2022). But here’s the question: How much of mental health is physical, and how much is shaped by how we interpret our experiences as good or bad? How are we even defining what is a “good experience” and what is a “bad experience?”

Social Media Fueling Awareness and Misconceptions About Mental Health

As I mentioned earlier, mental health awareness has grown over the last two decades, thanks to younger generations seeking to address and highlight this topic. And social media has been a prime platform to highlight the very real issues that surround it. 

However, due to the nature of social media and the algorithms that drive it, much of the content involves distortions of truth that will get clicks, views, follows, and oh, “don’t forget to like and subscribe!” With a fear-driven algorithm in place, it could only lead to incorrect definitions, varying stigmas, and so many misunderstandings that people can struggle to even care about what is true and what isn’t. 

Clarity is important and the clearest cases come through stories: LeBron James’ battle with confidence and not wanting to let his fans down, and stories of gymnast Simone Biles' battle with mental health during the 2020 Olympics that caused her to bow out of the competition, only to earn gold medals galore in 2024. 

These we can understand, but the difference between anxiety, stress, and depression? Probably not. Mostly, because there is no difference in the body, only in one’s expectations of what they will experience based on what they’ve been told about those terms.

Currently, mental health is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “a state of well-being in which the individual realizes their own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and contribute to their community.” Is this how you’ve been defining it? If not, you’re not alone. Even then, this definition would differ from country to country, state to state, and even community to community, despite the WHO. 

But what is anxiety? What is stress? What is pressure? What is therapy? Oooo, therapy. Therapy is a sticky word for many: There are dozens of kinds of therapy, but how do you know which one is the right one and if it’s right for you? Many people refer to it as a catch-all for any struggle: “Everyone should be in therapy!” they exclaim gleefully. Should everyone be in therapy, though? 

Do I Need Therapy? Here’s What You Need to Know

Therapy can be life changing. But like any tool, its impact depends on how and why we use it. This isn’t a dismissal of therapy — it’s an invitation to also explore what your body already knows.

For some, it’s therapy is exactly what they need. For others, it’s simply an anti-depression monster they can keep feeding with their negative experiences, watching as it grows into a 20-year behemoth. They’re not addressing or unable to address why they need the monster to eat the bad experiences.  Instead, they are simply keeping the Depression Monster at bay, so they can keep navigating this life. 

Therapy is invaluable in certain circumstances, but not for all. It depends on the person, their understanding of their body, the specific reasons they want therapy, and so many other factors. But the larger question: why do you need therapy at all? 

Remember how mental health came from physical medicine practices? Similar to having a broken arm, we connect anxiety, depression, stress, etc., to having a “broken” mind. 

This has created stigma, which fuels shame: shame that you can’t just “get over it”; shame about the trauma or situation you’re in; shame that you even have to go to therapy to begin with. On top of these, if you think therapy or psychotropic drugs are the only way to get better, you may even have shame over not getting better. 

These mindsets prevent people from improving their symptoms and feed the narrative that you need someone else to tell you about your experiences and what they mean. 

That is not to discount the value of another’s opinion, as having someone else’s reflections can be deeply meaningful, but should that be the starting point? Are you even broken at all, or might you simply be missing a piece to understand your experiences and why you feel the way you do? 

Let me put it this way: When was the last time you just sat and felt your body? Nothing else. No other goal. Just to feel the sensations your body is experiencing. Your body tells you things such as when you’re hungry, when you’re injured, when you’re fatigued, when you’re happy… but also, when you’ve been thinking about something in the future and it wants you to stop (anxiety) and when you keep wishing you did something different or had a different outcome in the past (depression). 

Instead of listening, we ask someone else to interpret our bodies, while not living in our bodies, to even know what questions we should be asking in relation to our issues. Is therapy a weird starting point now? 

Training Mental Fitness for Performance 

Now, all of the above has trickled into athletics. There is stigma, although less now than ever, in what your teammates may think if you go to therapy or take medication. In addition, there is little talk about preventing mental health issues. 

Our society is built around this model of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but you should absolutely put time into your physical fitness, so how does mental fitness not meet this same bar? Mental fitness is a term I want to bring into this space: you are not broken, but we do need to learn how to exercise our minds to keep it fit and healthy, just like our bodies. 

Mental fitness allows you to adapt to stress, rather than break; it allows you to process

and learn from setbacks, like a missed shot, rather than dwell on how poorly you performed; it allows you to focus on unity and complementing another, rather than being better than the person next to you; and it allows you to quiet your mind when the world is so damn noisy and telling you all about who you are. 

Then, many have teams and institutions that struggle to address these issues, because they are following the same model of mental health: “you’re broken, let’s figure out how to fix you.” They create cookie-cutter programs that fill your head with more words, more definitions, but rarely even attempt to address the issues at their core.

This is why mental fitness is so important. When you train your body, you learn how to test your abilities: your agility, your strength, your endurance, your nutritional needs, the specific way you shoot a basketball, the way you kick a soccer ball, and how you pay attention to the gun to get off the line faster in track. Through this understanding, you can focus your efforts and forge your skills to a finely tuned point. The same can be done with your mind, and to a more significant degree, how your mind and body connect to create performance.

The more you train your mind, the more you see where you can improve, what makes you more resilient, how to turn a loss into an opportunity to learn, how to use a missed shot as a tool to improve your next shot, and how fear can cause you to make irrational decisions. But you will not know these things if you do not train and if you do not train, they will rule over you. 

Therapy is a tool, but there are so many more tools to train your mind. Want to feel happier? There’s a tool for that. Want to be able to evaluate your ability and improve? There’s a tool for that. Want to watch the words of others roll off your shoulders? Yep. There’s a tool for that.

Mindfulness, visualizations, imagery, journaling, community relationships, support from others, nutrition, VR, and your body itself can all be invaluable tools in improving your mental fitness. Through these tools, you can “rewire” your brain with a solid foundation and an understanding of what you are trying to achieve. 

Why This Matters in Athletics (and Beyond)

Elite athletes offer powerful examples of training their mental fitness. They sharpen their minds as intensely as they train their bodies, not just to perform better, but to be prepared for challenges on and off the field. For example, understanding how to focus their attention to avoid negative thoughts allows them to handle high-pressure moments of any kind. 

It also gives them clarity of mind to lead their team and build unity. Through their own understanding, they can be a model to others on how to be resilient to pressure and how to quickly recover from setbacks, like a missed shot or a mistake.

If we apply this thinking to all students, professionals, and communities, we build cultures of strength and unity, not silence. These cultures will help build Eternal Athletes - athletes that are resilient and understand how to use their minds to enhance their performance.

Mental Fitness is What Society is Missing

It begins with understanding where we’ve been and how our history has shaped our current understanding of our thoughts and how we feel about our experiences. From here, we can begin to understand how the words we use shape how we feel about our experiences and how using different words can free us from some of the traps of language. 

Shifting the conversation from “mental health,” a term associated with negative experiences, to “mental fitness,” a term that implies strength and offers a way to improve how you feel, we can shift conversations to uplift each other. 

Every person is different and has had different experiences that have shaped their understanding of the world. This is why cookie-cutter programs do not often work: they cannot cover all of the issues an individual may need to understand to understand themselves. 

The solution is to have tailored programs that focus on proactive growth, rather than reactive solutions. Lastly, we need to understand and treat the mind and body as one. They are not separate, and the more we treat them as separate goals, the less we understand the importance of how they connect. The more we understand their connections, the better we will understand how to enhance performance, build strong and capable leaders, and live life fully, both on and off the field. 

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Disclaimer: The content provided by the National Sports Association of Wellness & Mental Fitness (NSAWMF) is for performance and developmental purposes. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing mental health challenges or emotional distress, please seek support from a licensed mental health professional. Always consult a qualified provider with any questions you may have regarding your mental well-being.