By Mark Kreidler
When Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest and collapsed on the field in the middle of the “Monday Night Football” game in Cincinnati on Jan. 2, Carrie Hastings, half a continent away, understood what she needed to do — and right away.
“I had a few guys that I sort of immediately knew I should check in on,” said Hastings, the Los Angeles Rams’ sports psychologist and mental health clinician. “A couple of spouses and significant others, too.”
Hastings’ familiarity with the Rams’ personnel, and with which players might be emotionally traumatized after watching Hamlin’s shocking medical emergency, was the product of her having spent six seasons with the club — getting to know the athletes, meeting rookies when they first arrive, and making herself a regular presence at the Rams’ facility.
Across the NFL, no such continuity of care exists. The league is working its way toward the kind of mental health support for its players, coaches, and staff in which a range of counseling is standard and readily accessible.
It was just over three years ago, in 2019, that the NFL implemented a formal program to manage its employees’ mental health needs. That came as part of a new collective bargaining agreement, after the NFL Players Association pushed hard for its creation. Among other things, the agreement mandates that each team have a licensed behavioral health clinician on staff.
But individual franchises still have great latitude in implementing that directive. Some have full-time sports psychologists; others employ clinicians part time, while a few contract with outside providers and make them available to players, Hastings said. And clinicians aren’t required to have any sports background, which some sports psychologists see as a critical flaw.
“This is a very specialized area,” said Sam Maniar, a psychologist who consults for the Cleveland Browns and formerly worked as the team’s full-time clinician.
“The environment of athletics, and especially at the highest level, is something that does require specialization, and not every clinician being brought into the NFL has that.”
Hastings was a sprinter and hurdler in her undergraduate years at Notre Dame, has deep professional experience with athletes, and is listed in the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s registry for sports psychology and mental training. She keeps her private practice a short drive from the Rams’ training facility in Agoura Hills, northwest of Los Angeles, and though technically a part-time employee, Hastings said she is at the facility three or four times a week “and basically on call 24/7 during the season.”
In that capacity, Hastings has worked to forge a foundation of trust with elite athletes who often think of a sports psychologist only in terms of getting them primed to compete.
“It’s often the case that a player comes in for something performance-related, and that opens up the door for conversations in other areas of mental health,” she said. “The relationship deepens.”
That kind of ingrained presence with teams is crucial, clinicians say, particularly as some athletes have begun to speak more openly about the mental and emotional challenges they face and have indirectly encouraged their peers to be more open to getting help.
Tennis sensation Naomi Osaka, Olympic gold medalists Simone Biles and Michael Phelps, NBA stars Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan all have publicly discussed their mental health challenges over the past decade, and several have led campaigns to raise awareness. “I credit them for discussing their struggles and the great benefits they received by accessing some care that was available to them,” said Maniar, who runs an athletic performance center in Ohio and works with college and high school football teams beyond his relationship with the Browns.
The NFL is a difficult arena for such conversations. Players in the league are accustomed to working through all manner of pain and injury practically as a job condition, and for much of the league’s existence, its athletes essentially were trained to show no vulnerability. (VK/KHN)
