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A New Movement - SAMHI at Western
A look into how this organization is changing the way athletes look at mental health
Nakisha Slavin says her mental health is an ongoing struggle. When she arrived at Western University, the field hockey captain says she had a great difficulty finding student athlete-specific resources on campus.
“I was talking to therapists who didn’t really understand the relation of sport and mental illness, and how sport played into my mental health,” she says.
Krista VanSlingerland says the combination of mental health counselling and sports psychology is not a common specialization at this point.
“Athletes want to talk to somebody that understands their unique sport environment,” the PhD candidate says. “There is a gap in the services that are available.”
While Slavin was doing her own research online about student athletes and mental health, she found the Student Athlete Mental Health Initiative, known as SAMHI. The Canadian charitable organization is dedicated to promoting wellness and mental health, and supporting student athletes.
“I thought it would be something that could be really beneficial at Western,” she said.
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WATCH: Nakisha Slavin talks about how she helped bring SAMHI to Western University.
(Video credit: Shannon Coulter and Michael Marti)
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A major part of SAMHI’s student athlete-centred approach is having teams of volunteers located on different post-secondary campuses in Canada. Slavin approached the athletic department about starting a team last year. Western is now the 18th SAMHI campus team, with Slavin and Angelica Galluzzo, the women’s soccer captain, serving as co-leads.
“Any student athlete can be a part of SAMHI,” says Galluzzo. “Our goal is to just raise awareness, educate and facilitate people to the resources that we have.”
Figure skater Denis Margalik is one of the SAMHI campus team members at Western. He attends SAMHI meetings and brings the information he learns to the other members on his figure skating team.
“With SAMHI, we’re trying to break the stigma of mental health and trying to raise awareness of what mental health really means,” Margalik says. “I believe people think it means you’re broken in a way and it’s not. It’s something that we all struggle with and we need to get that across.”
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Three members of SAMHI at Western pose on Bell Let's Talk Day in January 2019.
This partnership with the athletic department on Bell Let's Talk Day is
one of the several initiatives SAMHI has taken so far at Western.
(Photo credit: Western SAMHI Facebook page)
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So far, Western’s SAMHI campus team has 55 members from 10 different sports teams. Galluzzo said the goal is to have one member from each team so that their messages will be relayed to all student athletes.
While they have only been active for less than a year, Slavin says the team has been working to determine their role on campus and how they can improve the lives of student athletes. So far, the team members have undergone mandatory training and participated in multiple workshops. The team also partnered with the athletic department for Bell Let’s Talk Day.
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