Commentary: The Dark Side of Top Level Sport: An Autobiographic Study of Depressive Experiences in Elite Sport Performers

This intriguing article explored a challenging topic using a novel albeit somewhat controversial methodology. This commentary is made from the perspective of an applied sports psychology practitioner who has conducted qualitative research, with the primary focus on how this informs best practice in consulting with athletes. Newman et al. (2016) certainly raised questions for practitioners about the use of autobiographies, particularly those which have had input from a second author. The act of writing encourages retrospective sense making (Gersie and King, 2003). A skilled writer creates a narrative coherence that is engaging for the reader. This is challenging when they are primarily used as data sets for qualitative enquiry. As Newman et al. (2016) suggest, stories of depression are marketable, and does this perhaps mean that authors or ghostwriters are prone to exaggeration? One should also be curious about how well the narrative description of depression matched the lived experience of the athletes at the time. Were the athletes able to describe their situation using eloquent metaphors or alliteration in the midst of their despair? Practitioner experience would question whether a depressed athlete is likely to have such fluent self-awareness—the reality of depression is more likely to be informed by a fuzzy logic, which is harder to articulate and marked more by withdrawn silences or frustrated outbursts than eloquent prose. The authors chose to focus on elite athletes, and by definition any athlete who writes an autobiography is likely to have, or had, a high public profile. To what extent is being in the public eye a mediating factor in the role of depression and performance? Certainly it would seem to add weight to both the approval of others and the emotional cost of failure, key factors that emerged in the analysis. This train of thought raises the possibility that one should consider celebrity performers in other fields such as music or acting who have reported depression. A quick Wikipedia search suggests there is no shortage of candidates for such a study. Do they report a similar relationship between their " craft " and depression as the elite athletes in this study? From my own limited reading it seems likely they do (e.g., Clapton, 2007). If so, then perhaps the issue is less about depression and elite sport performance and more about being human and the search for a meaningful identity. As a practitioner, I have encountered a small handful …