When Michael Phelps, one of the most decorated athletes in American sports history, started speaking up about his mental health challenges, Ron Bishop took note.
A professor of communications at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Bishop keeps a running list of book ideas for when and if he has the time to write them. When Phelps spoke up, followed shortly thereafter by Serena Williams, the time had come to dive into a topic Bishop had long been thinking about: how sportswriters have covered the mental health of athletes, how that’s changed over time and where improvements are still needed.
Bishop’s book, The Thematic Evolution of Sports Journalism’s Narrative of Mental Illness: A Little Less Conversation, analyzes the three distinct periods of how writers have broached the topic, ranging from yellow journalism and sensationalist headlines of the late 1800s, through depicting an athlete as a “problem” for a team rather than a person trying to fight their demons, to today’s coverage of athletes that still tries to make discussions of mental health “palatable” for readers.
Research for the book “started out maybe as more of a comparison, which I may still want to do someday, with Michael Phelps and Serena Williams, or looking across male and female, and how the difference in coverage unfolded, Black vs white — there are differences there as well. I still have the paper here somewhere that has the original list of athletes and I kept adding to them,” Bishop says.
One of the first athletes whose mental health struggles became public knowledge was Martin Bergen, a catcher with the Boston Beaneaters.
“He was a very moody, volatile person who exhibited what today would easily be diagnosed as mental illness,” Bishop says. “His play suffered from this and he was absent from the team. The writers glossed over it by lionizing his physical ability. In January 1900, he killed his wife and son and then ended his own life. The coverage of that, in the days before photography, the artists’ renderings were graphic, the headlines screamed all kinds of misnomers and misinformation about mental illness.” But there was also the element of “nobody knew” that the person was struggling, followed by the “sad and crestfallen teammates left to figure out what happened.”
In 1955, Jimmy Piersall, another Boston baseball player, wrote a book called Fear Strikes Out about his struggles with mental illness.
“That was the first time an athlete’s experience of mental illness was definitely whitewashed and made for public consumption. The goal still is to make the reader comfortable with the experience that you’re writing about and not go too far. The biggest problem in more recent coverage is lack of a real discussion of the need for systemic change to help people who experience mental illness,” Bishop says. “The demonization that’s seen in all other forms of media content, that mentally ill people commit violence at a higher rate than they actually do, is still there. It’s getting better, but it’s still there.”
When athletes speak up today, the way their mental health is discussed and addressed is under their control to a far greater degree than ever before, because they have more control over their own stories and public perception, according to Bishop.
But there’s still a difference whether an athlete is respected or viewed as a problem for their team — as was the case with two baseball players in the 1970s, Alex Johnson and Tony Horton. When Johnson retained an attorney to settle a grievance against his team, he was still depicted as an “angry Black man,” while the press was much more lenient and forgiving of Horton, who was white. Both men were having similar struggles with their health and their teams, but the coverage of those events were different because one was portrayed and discussed as a problem, while the other was not criticized for letting down his team.
