Beyond the Field of Play: Creating a Seamless and Holistic Interdisciplinary System for Student-Athlete Mental Health

Abstract

The collegiate student-athlete experience represents a demanding dual-career pathway within a unique micro-community, the athletic department, where deeply ingrained cultural norms of invincibility contribute to a pervasive mental health stigma and significant treatment gap. Despite organizational efforts by the NCAA to shift toward fostering healthy, supportive environments, a multi-level, systemic solution remains critical. This article proposes a robust interdisciplinary collaboration model, grounded in the principles of the Social-Ecological Model (SEM), leveraging three key professional groups to address mental health across multiple levels of influence.

The Athletic Trainer (AT) serves as the crucial frontline Community Gatekeeper, leveraging daily contact for early identification and triage at the individual level. The Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) provides essential clinical expertise for targeted therapeutic intervention at the relational level (individual and group counseling). Critically, the Social Worker (SW) addresses the systemic and environmental determinants of health, offering resource navigation, policy advocacy, and community linkage at the organizational and macro levels. By combining the AT’s immediate access, the LPC’s clinical depth, and the SW’s systemic advocacy, this triadic model facilitates institutional transformation, builds community-level resilience, and offers a replicable framework for integrating mental wellness support in similar high-pressure population groups, such as local schools and community sports organizations.