Under pressure: the Wellbeing in Sport and Performance Lab
Sports is crucial to Australia’s national identity. It shapes how we think about achievement, comparison and pressure. It also exposes the cracks. The Wellbeing in Sport and Performance Lab focuses on how mental health and wellbeing are experienced, shaped and supported across high-performance environments.
Led by Dr Courtney Walton within the Brain and Mental Health Hub, the lab studies wellbeing across elite sport, youth pathways and community settings, along with fields like music and dance where similar pressures appear every day.
The work crosses clinical, sport, and organisational psychology. That mix reflects how these environments actually operate. The team uses interviews, surveys, and participatory approaches, and builds lived experience into research from the start.
“Ultimately the goal of our lab is to produce work that advances scientific literature while shaping policy and practice within sport and performance organisations.”
Bringing psychology into Australia’s sporting culture
The lab responds to a clear gap in Australia’s psychology landscape by offering exciting, translatable research in an underrepresented field. Sport plays a central role in everyday life, yet it has often been on the edges of formal psychology training.
The work also builds upon strong expertise within the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences across clinical, applied, professional, neuropsychology programs. The Lab currently includes students across Honours, Masters, and PhD programs, as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow and an Athlete Research Advisor. It connects those strengths to performance settings where mental health support is often complex and underdeveloped.
Research that stays close to the realities of sport
Suicide prevention in community sports
Community clubs are often dealing with complex mental health crises without the support they need. This project, funded by Movember in both Australia and the UK in collaboration with Orygen and several sporting partners, aims to understand how clubs respond to suicide and self-harm and what they need to respond better. The goal to develop practical resources that help clubs act early and respond effectively when it matters most.
Self-criticism and self-compassion among elite athletes
Self-criticism is common in elite sport, serving as a key way athletes handle setbacks in a highly competitive and pressurised environment. The lab is mapping how it works, what it leads to and the valuable alternative approach of self-compassion. Researchers are developing the Self-Compassion in Performance Inventory with collaborators in Australia, China, Sweden and Canada. The measure will be critical to advancing research and supporting applied practice.
Impact of athlete mental health narratives
Elite athletes are speaking more openly about mental health. This project examines how those disclosures and broader mental health narratives, communication and campaigns are received and whether they influence attitudes and help-seeking behaviour.
Psychological safety among elite youth athletes
When athletes feel safe to speak up, they are more likely to seek support. This research, led by PhD student Angela Heinisch and in collaboration with the University of Toronto in Canada, explores how those environments are created and how they shape mental health outcomes over time within youth elite sports.
Letting athletes and coaches speak for themselves
A defining feature of the lab is its emphasis on qualitative research. Currently, they are working on several new qualitative approaches in Grounded Theory and Case Study.
“These approaches allow for a more central and nuanced voice to come more directly through participants.”
One project now underway uses grounded theory to build a detailed account of self-criticism in elite sport. Through in-depth interviews with athletes and coaches, this research tracks when it appears, what drives it, how it shapes both performance and wellbeing, as well as how athletes try to manage it, if at all.
“We are really excited about this project as it has so much potential to meaningfully inform clinical and applied approaches to working with athletes and other high performers, for whom self-criticism often becomes a driving force of psychological distress.”
The lab is also embedding lived experience into its structure through the appointment of an Athlete Research Advisor. AFLW player and psychology student Isabella Grant contributes directly to the design, interpretation, and translation of research.
Her input has already shaped several projects and continues to sharpen the work. It keeps the research grounded in real experience
The Wellbeing in Sport and Performance is focused on mental health in environments where pressure is constant and expectations run high. The work stays close to the people at the centre of those settings and produces research that can be used effectively in practice.