Athletes, coaches and National Federations will have the opportunity to attend a wide-ranging variety of workshops dedicated to mental health and well-being onsite at the World Aquatics Championships Doha 2024.

World Aquatics will offer sixteen different workshops between 4-17 February in Doha, Qatar.

On 12 February, a Forum will be organized for the first time. During the one-hour event, various aspects of health and well-being will be discussed with the experts and representatives of the Aquatics Community. The Forum will be moderated by John Mason and open to all competitors.

Along with mental health, topics that will be explored include stress management, performance anxiety, assisting a teammate, overcoming injuries, nutrition, anti-doping, and personal and career development.

Additionally, there will be a dedicated space at the ‘Athletes Lounge’ in the main competition area at the Aspire Dome built around the activities and initiatives. This includes a relaxation room and access for athletes to a premium account on the Calm App to utilise all features during their time at the World Aquatics Championships.

Dr. Alan Currie – a consultant psychiatrist specializing in Regional Affective Disorders, which focus on ‘difficult to treat’ emotional disorders – will be the lead presenter for four workshops in Doha, in addition to offering his expertise and guidance to athletes and coaches as needed. His areas of specialization also encompass recovery, social inclusion, and sport and exercise psychiatry.

“We have undoubtedly gotten better addressing athlete mental health in the last ten years and have progressed at developing services understanding why these problems emerge and what we can do about it,” Currie informs. “I think the health and support for coaches lags a bit behind recognizing that you don’t have to be an athlete in high-performance sport to fight the risks of mental health.

“The umbrella term we use is ‘entourage’ meaning everyone: the performance director, coaches, the physiotherapist, team doctor, nutritionist, psychologist,” Currie says.

“The constellation of people surrounding an athlete can find themselves in a bad place with their mental health too, so how do we understand that and what do we do about it?

“This has been slower to develop which is why I believe the World Aquatics initiatives are good ones,” he said. “It’s not just about doing the workshops, but also having a mental health presence around the event.”

Dr. Currie mentioned how vital it is to address these themes at the World Aquatics Championships as it helps put this topic higher on the agenda for a global audience. The workshops, initiatives, and programs being provided by World Aquatics, focused on mental health and well-being, will serve and benefit approximately 2,600 athletes from 201 countries, in addition to coaches and National Federations.

Currie, who is based in Newcastle, England, also works with the UK Sports Institute and Team GB, in addition to serving as a member of the International Olympic Committee mental health working group since 2018.

The four workshop topics that Currie will lead are stress management, how to ensure the well-being of an athlete as a coach, how to recognize that a teammate needs support with his/her mental well-being, and coaches’ mental health and well-being.

Currie provided an overview of the mission and objectives of the workshops – equally dedicated to coaches as to athletes – that he will preside over at the upcoming World Championships.

“The focus will be on helping coaches to be aware how they might become stressed and what they can do about it, helping them to understand the pressures and stresses that athletes might be under, and how that might manifest and show itself because it is not always very visible,” Currie said. “And how they might support and help athletes if they are in a bad place to get help and restore themselves.

“There is also a session specifically for swimmers similar to the coaches’ workshop, helping the athletes to understand how stress and pressure might manifest itself and what they can do and how to avoid it,” Currie said.

Detecting Mental Health Issues

Currie highlights that high-performance athletes can face challenges in detecting mental health issues. 

“You can’t rely on poor performance to detect mental health concerns because some athletes have problems with mental health, despite still performing fairly well in the pool,” Currie explains. “Sometimes their performances hold up for quite awhile, so you can’t just look at someone’s performance and say he is not doing well and maybe there is a problem with their mental health.”

Currie informs that there are four strands to consider when assessing one’s state of mental health and specifically to athletes as related to performance: thoughts, emotions and feelings, behaviours, and physical changes.

“When you have a framework that looks at these four elements – two of them are invisible,” Currie said. “You don’t always know how someone is feeling unless you ask them and you don’t what someone is thinking unless you have a conversation with them.

“Understanding that it becomes a way to move forward and think about how to approach an athlete. How do you know if they are not in a good place with mental health and how can you find out? We can then explore what we can do – is this just a day-to-day fluctuation that we all have, is it just a bad day, a bad couple of days, or is it something that needs much more care and attention?

“Once we determine someone with bad mental health, how do you support them to get back into the sporting arena?” Currie says, noting potential next steps and guidance.

Dealing with stress, injury and mental health at the competition venue and beyond

Currie explained how specialists might cooperate with and treat an athlete who acknowledges that there may be a problem, mentally or physically, but still wants to remain focused on competing.

“There is a parallel with what we do with physical health – if an athlete spends ten to twelve years getting to a particular place, then you do everything you can to get someone through the next few days,” Currie says, envisioning a potential scenario.

“If someone breaks down physically during games-time, there are things that physiotherapists or a sports medicine doctor can do short-term to get someone from a bad place to a better place.

“After the championship, it is important to follow up and sit down with the athlete and ask ‘How did your shoulder get so bad and what did you do wrong’ that we had to take these emergency measures at the championship and how can we learn from that, so next season it doesn’t happen again.”

Stress Management

Currie outlined and provided further insight about what his workshop geared toward coaches on stress management, on Feb. 10, will entail.

“The most capable people can be very resilient and manage stress for a very long time,” Currie explains. “What that means is that when the stresses become overwhelming, they fall off a cliff, so it is not gradual. Every stress takes you down a little. Acknowledging the acute stress early and managing it is important.”

Furthermore, Currie addressed how one can better cope with the daily stresses surrounding a competition.

“We have a framework for looking at the stresses – what do you have to do hour-by-hour, day-by-day to manage the acute stresses the day before a competition and the techniques to deal with that.

“Then we also look at the long-term stresses – those that might manifest from one season to the next, the much longer-term stresses and how you approach that,” Currie says, giving a brief preview of what will be tackled in the workshop. “We’ll give some understanding about acknowledging stress and some tools to deal with the day-to-day, week-to-week and longer terms stresses.”

Providing Long-term Mental Health Care and Well-Being

Currie summarized what he believes he and the team of specialists can offer to athletes, coaches and National Federations during the World Aquatics Championships in Doha and beyond.

“Most of our work gets done in the background, unseen, and actually most of it gets done outside of games-time,” Currie said.

“The future is understanding the hot spots about mental health - we work really hard to help athletes with the transition out of sport. When athletes retire, that is a big event and life beyond sport is an area where we need to continue to target mental health support.”

The World Aquatics Championships Doha 2024 will be contested from 2-18 February, serving as a qualifier for the Olympic Games Paris 2024.

Swimmers in Doha will compete in 75 medal events across six aquatics sports, with competitions at the Aspire Dome, Hamad Aquatic Centre and Old Doha Port.