ABSTRACT
Patient safety is the top priority for mental health practitioners working with any population. For this reason, clinical training places considerable emphasis on the assessment of suicide risk and prompt effective interventions to prevent harm. Clinical sport psychologists must recognize and respond appropriately to risk in athlete populations. Athletes, who may face unique forms of stigmatization or situational pressures to maintain a stoic demeanor, may be among those socialized to avoid seeking help. This chapter examines suicide risk in athletes across sports and age ranges and the risk factors that they face. Unique challenges that athlete populations confront include fear of rejection by teams or teammates, potential loss of athletic identity if opportunities to compete are taken away, punitive perfectionistic attitudes about performance, psychological bullying from competitors, challenges associated with chronic pain and injury, mistreatment or abuse by coaches or other authority figures related to sport, and discrimination and maltreatment associated with racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other prejudices. The potential presence of these and other risk factors needs to be explored in the psychological assessment of athletes.
