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An updated systematic review of interventions to increase awareness of mental health and well-being in athletes, coaches, officials and parents

G. Breslin, S. Shannon, Michael Cummings, G. Leavey

Systematic Reviews, 2022

83 citations

Abstract

Background Interventions designed to increase mental health awareness in sport have grown substantially in the last 5 years, meaning that those involved in policy, research and intervention implementation are not fully informed by the latest systematic evaluation of research, risking a disservice to healthcare consumers. Hence, our aim was to update a 2017 systematic review that determined the effect of sport-specific mental health awareness programmes to improve mental health knowledge and help-seeking among sports coaches, athletes and officials. We extended the review to incorporate parents as a source of help-seeking and report the validity of outcome measures and quality of research design that occurred since the original review. Methods Sport-specific mental health awareness programmes adopting an experimental or quasi-experimental design were included for synthesis. Five electronic databases were searched: Psychinfo, Medline (OVID interface), Scopus, Cochrane and Cinahl. Each database was searched from its year of inception to June 2020. As all of the outcomes measured were derived from psychometric scales, we observed statistically significant quantitative effects on the basis of p < .05, and a small, medium or large effect size as d = .2, .5 or .8, respectively. Risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane and QATSQ tools. Results Twenty-eight articles were included from the 2048 retrieved, eighteen additional articles since the original review. Eighteen studies…

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