After watching and following the sport of tennis for a few years, one day last Summer a thought popped into my head that I was surprised I'd never considered before. Dealing with mental health struggles is difficult no matter who you are, but imagine being a professional tennis player having to cope with these struggles.
The immediate question in my mind after this thought was has anyone ever pulled out of a tournament citing their mental health? At the time I came to the conclusion of surely not, or it would've been a fairly newsworthy story and I expected I would have heard about it. The follow up question in my mind - could we ever get to a place where it is the norm for players to be able to pull out of a tournament citing their mental health if needed?
Funnily enough, just days after I'd had this thought and kept my questions to myself, Serena Williams posted to Instagram, opening up about her own struggles with post-partum depression and how she was trying to juggle those feelings with her career. As a follower of tennis I sometimes blog about it and had been thinking about starting a series where I could chat about a few topical tennis things in one post, so Serena's story coupled with the questions I had come up with a few days before gave me the push I needed to start my Points to Defend blog series, in which I used a section of the first instalment to speak about mental health in tennis and how I wanted the conversation to be opened up. You can read that blog post here to gain more insight into how I became interested in this issue last Summer, mental health is discussed in the second section.
Once it became time to start thinking about topics to investigate for my MMP just under a year later, I knew I had to come back to these questions I had and try to finally find an answer for them. This is something I aim to do by interviewing pro players both active and retired, speaking to those involved in the professional tours - the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) and the WTA (Women's Tennis Association), and others who have a career within the sport of tennis with adequate knowledge and an opinion on the subject.
More needs to be done not only to break the stigmas surrounding mental health in tennis, but also to ensure there is adequate support offered to pro players by the sport's governing bodies to support their mental wellbeing. It is my goal to do this with my documentary Game, Set, Mental Health.