It was the year that mental health took a prominent position in the sports world — led by two female athletes, Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka. AP journalists who covered the story reflect. 2021Notebook
I think all of us who were covering it, we didn’t really know what was going on. Right? So you’re watching the sport event unfold in front of you with one of the most famous athletes in the world. And you see her fall. And I think everyone just kind of assumed that she had an ankle injury or that she had a leg injury or some kind of physical injury. And so of course, you go into your automatic mode, where you have a very famous injured athlete.
There are two things that actually struck me about that day. One is that her mental health issues were treated very much like a physical injury. So much so in that they they took her back into the back where they examined her with a doctor and took her into the injury room. ... There’s a photo that I took that’s my favorite photo from that day where the rings are above her and she has her hand over her mouth and you could just tell on her face that she was like, “Oh no.
It’s no longer a stigma. I also think that the fear of “Will I lose my job if I do this?” has been diminished a little bit because teams and organizations and leagues will really look like bad people and out of touch ... if they say, “Oh, you can’t play Sunday, you’re fired. You know, we have to cut you because, you know, you might have a mental breakdown if you play and you feel like you need to step away but we can’t afford that.” The stigma is gone.
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