Conference Agenda

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened existing concerns about mental health and illness. The news media is an important source of health information, but there has been little research into how advice about mental health is communicated to the public via the news media. In this study, we examined how advice about building and maintaining mental health was discursively constructed in the news media in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. A discourse analytic approach informed by Critical Discursive Psychology was employed to analyse 436 articles published in daily newspapers in Australia between 1 January and 31 December 2020, which contained references to mental health and the pandemic. Three main interpretative repertoires were identified – negative emotions are a risk to mental health and must be managed; risky emotions should be managed by being controlled (based around a ‘border control’ metaphor); and risky emotions should be managed by being released (based around a ‘pressure cooker’ metaphor). This study demonstrates that, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, advice constructed negative emotions as problematic; and positioned individuals as responsible for the habitual management of negative emotions. The potential implications, productive and unproductive, of such discourses for goals of improving population mental health are discussed.

The abrupt and indefinite suspension of sports events resulting from the outbreak of COVID-19 took a heavy toll on collegiate sports, particularly in the Philippines, which had the most prolonged and strictest lockdowns in the world. This phenomenological study examined the subjective well-being of 20 Filipino collegiate athletes who participated in semi-structured online interviews. Focusing on the participants’ lived experiences and sense-making during the global pandemic, a thematic analysis of the verbatim transcriptions generated four themes: ambivalence with the lockdown, struggling with home-based training and studying, redefining relationships, and pursuing personal growth. Results revealed mixed emotions of uncertainty, anxiety, and boredom while appreciating the respite from rigorous training and time for healing injuries. The convenience of training and studying at home soon became frustrating with limited training supervision and equipment, lack of stable internet, and loss of face-to-face interactions. However, renewed connections with family and friends and improved communications with coaches and teammates provided much-needed social support. Engagement in other forms of leisure, learning new hobbies, and acquiring other skills promoted personal development. Recommendations from the study were presented to the varsity directors of universities, informing policies and programs to address student-athletes well-being during the pandemic.

Hungary was hit hard by the pandemic, recording over 3000 deaths per million people, the highest figure of any EU country. Possible reasons can be found in the ongoing problems with the quality and efficiency of health services exacerbated by the emergency.

The experiences of 31 patients (adults diagnosed with COVID-19 and treated in a hospital) were collected with semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The transcripts formed the text base on which our research group performed reflexive thematic analysis.

During the process, we discovered a recurrent phenomenon: patients taking a – sometimes oddly – active, caring role in their hospital recovery. Therefore, we narrowed the focus on the experience of self-caring and resilient behaviour as an answer to the healthcare system's underlying problems.

Our final thematic map compounds five overarching themes from which we present the following ones: (1) Patient (self)care: a functional element of the hospital system in COVID-19, and (2) Ingenuity and resilience: solutions of the individual in the healthcare system.

The particularity of our results lies in the context: on a personal level, being the patient and becoming the helper simultaneously, and on a societal level, the failure of the much-needed support in the pandemic situation.

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a global health crisis that severely disrupted the lives of elite athletes. Like the rest of humanity, athletes felt the direct psychological consequences of the pandemic with the mandatory suspension of sporting events, loss of income, limited access to adequate training facilities, and constrained interactions with coaches and teammates. In this phenomenological study, twenty Filipino national athletes (F = 10, M = 10) participated in semi-structured online interviews to provide accounts of their lived experiences and well-being during the government-imposed extended community quarantine. Attending to participants’ subjectivity and sense-making, a thematic analysis of the verbatim transcriptions yielded four themes: adapting to uncertainty, recalibrating life goals, reviving connections, and pursuing personal growth. Findings from the study informed the design of sport psychology interventions and mobilization of resources to address the mental health needs of national athletes during the pandemic. These included the provision of webinars to promote mental health literacy among coaches and athletes, sessions offering safe spaces for discussing mental health concerns, and individual and team consultations for resetting goals and redefining athletic identity. Moreover, collaboration with other service units for effective training and conditioning, proper nutrition, and injury prevention was facilitated.