Vivianne Miedema believes that psychological assistance for top athletes should be normalized. The 25-year-old Arsenal striker writes in her first column for the General Newspaper that there is still too much of the idea in the top sports world that athletes are not allowed to show weakness. Miedema wants to emphasize that top athletes ‘are also people’ and cites Gregory van der Wiel and Ricardo Kishna as examples, who revealed their mental problems at the end of 2020 and, according to Miedema, received a lot of comments.
Miedema admits that she did not believe in psychological help at first. “Talk about your feelings in a room? I didn’t have to. We really shouldn’t do that, I thought then. And look now. Now I think it’s ridiculous if a club doesn’t employ a psychologist.” The all-time top scorer of the the Dutch Lionesses (104 international matches, 85 goals) has had a permanent psychologist since she joined her current club Arsenal, of which she is certainly not ashamed. “In fact, I would recommend it to everyone.”
The goalkeeper thinks that the outside world has too little insight into the actual lives of top athletes. “People say: pressure is part of being a top athlete, isn’t it? Oh yes, certainly. To a certain extent, absolutely. But we top athletes are also people, aren’t we. With our own problems. You have to be able to feel the freedom to be honest about it . Without the outside world seeing it as weak.” That is still too often the case, Miedema believes, and cites the Van der Wiel and Kishna cases as an example.
Van der Wiel, who played his last duel as a pro in 2018, wrote a candid story on his own website at the end of 2020 about the mental problems he was struggling with. Kishna followed not much later, through the program Andy Not too Vermeijde about his panic attacks and depression. The two ex-Ajacieds were commented on social media, which made Miedema angry. “People don’t know what’s going on in the life of a top athlete. Zero point zero.”
Miedema quotes a number of anecdotes. For example, she writes about the Olympic Games in Tokyo, where she was active with the Lionesses last summer. “A major tournament always results in performance pressure, and the current corona situation is added to that. One wrong test and the big goal is gone. Living with that thought is mentally very tough.” As an eighteen-year-old girl, she also thinks that she had already benefited from psychological assistance when she went to the World Cup in Canada. “You can be very tough about that, but that pressure just became too much for me. I had to grow up very early. That is not easy, even though you may think so. And so everyone has their own story. Give everyone, also outside the sports world, the space to deal with that.”