Professional athletes who have fled conflict or persecution often face mental health struggles that their sports organisations are not equipped to handle. Current mental health guidelines in sport rarely involve input from migrant athletes themselves, and they lack the cultural competence needed to address the specific traumas of forced migration. This project will systematically review existing evidence to identify what works—and what does not—when organisations try to support these athletes. The researchers will then turn those findings into practical case studies and workshops that sports bodies can use to build better mental health governance structures. If successful, the work could reshape how national sport organisations in the UK and Canada develop policies, moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to one that accounts for cultural context and lived experience. Because sport organisations are highly visible and influential, the lessons learned could also inform non-sport workplaces, schools, and public services that serve migrant populations. The project does not collect new data or test an intervention; it synthesises existing knowledge into actionable guidance for organisations that currently lack it.
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Mental health is a fundamental component of overall well-being and is a basic human right (WHO, 2022). Athletes are often positioned as role models in society and are regarded as resilient to adversity; however, the demands placed on them can negatively affect their mental health. Moreover, cultural and lived experiences, including forced migrations, drastically affect athletes' mental health, with vulnerability increasing when athletes transition into new cultural environments. Organisational structures can improve migrant athletes' abilities to handle adversity and acculturate into their new environments but remain ill-informed of their mental health needs. The proposed project aims to expand the role of governance structures in providing systematic support for migrant athletes as those most vulnerable to mental ill-health. The creation of system level governance structures for supporting mental health offers the opportunity for individual and organisational development (Wagstaff & Quartiroli, 2023). More specifically, should migrant athletes be supported in maintaining and/or improving their mental health during their transitions into new sport contexts, the lived experience they bring with them offers sport organisations the benefit of increasing diversity in knowledge and practice, increasing competition, and benefitting from more inclusive environments (Horowitz & McDaniel, 2015). Sport organisations have increasingly recognised the importance of athletes' well-being with the publication of guidelines to support athletes' mental health. However, there remains a lack of stakeholder, namely migrant athlete, involvement in the development of these guidelines and focus on the role of cultural competence for those working in mental health in sport. Owing to the prevalent role of sport in society, a deeper understanding of these gaps in system level supports for mental health offers the potential for findings to resonate across sport and non-sport organisations. The proposed project will synthesise knowledge through a critical scoping review methodology (Levac et al., 2010; Sabiston et al., 2022). This scoping review will allow for the research team to remain broad in scope when seeking to systematically summarise the emerging evidence for how to develop culturally sensitive mental health policies and potential steps organisations may consider when developing mental health governance structures. Knowledge developed through the scoping review will be disseminated in a novel fashion through the composition of case study stories that allow organisational management staff to develop contextualised and locally relevant solutions. The findings from the scoping review will be shared via (a) horizontal and effective communication and (b) change orientation knowledge mobilisation strategies (Sales et al., 2024). Communication strategies include sharing the findings with national (i.e., in Canada and the UK) sport organisations through presentations at national conferences, the delivery of a report and the offer to tailored knowledge mobilisation workshops whereby the research team work with organisations to implement mental health support. The review will also provide important scholarly advancements by significantly expanding the dominant focus on athlete mental health from an individual lens, to one at a contextual, system and cultural level. Change orientation will include mobilising the knowledge into actionable steps for organisations to develop governance structures which better support migrant athletes' mental health. To this end, the research team is comprised of award-winning early career and eminent scholars, who all have extensive experience conducting and leading knowledge synthesis projects.
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