Sport, Mental Illness and Sociology

Sport, Mental Illness and Sociology by Michael Atkinson

At a time when the public discussion of mental illness in society is reaching a high point, athletes and other sports insiders remain curiously silent about their private battles with a range of mental illnesses. While a series of professional athletes have exposed the deep, dark secret related to the pervasiveness of mental illness in high performance sport, relatively little is known, sociologically, about what mental illness culturally means inside sport.  This edited collection showcases research on how sport, as a social institution, may actually produce dangerous cultural practices and contexts that foster the development of mental illness within athlete groups. Further, chapters also illustrate how sport, when organized with sensitivity and care, may serve to help manage mental illnesses. Rather than analyzing mental illness as an individual phenomenon, contributors to this volume equally attest to how mental illness is socially developed, constructed, managed, and culturally understood within sport settings. The book highlights the relevance of a range of theories pertinent to the social study of mental illness including dramaturgy, cultural studies, learning theory, symbolic interaction, existentialism, and total pain theory. Chapters range from the discussion of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, drug addiction, epilepsy, mental trauma, stigma, the mass mediation of mental illness, and the promise of sport as a vehicle for personal and collective recovery.

Sociologists, social psychologists, and cultural psychologists collate and showcase what their fields have produced to date regarding mental health issues in sportAmong their topics are mental illness stigma, researching trauma in the context of sport, depression and suicide in professional sports work, invisible disabilities, the mass mediation of mental illness in sport, and in it for the long run: researching mental health and illness. -- Annotation ©2019 * (protoview.com) *

Michael Atkinson is Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. His research and teaching interests focus on the social experience of suffering and pain, the phenomenology of anxiety and depression, existentialism, and ethnographic research methods.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781787434707
ISBN 10	1787434702
Title	Sport, Mental Illness and Sociology
Author	Michael Atkinson
Series	Research In The Sociology Of Sport
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Emerald Publishing Limited
Year published	2018-12-14
Number of pages	208
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable