A Rutgers sports psychologist and behavioral health director discusses mental skills training for high performers. They describe building a comprehensive program at Rutgers that combines mental health treatment, group therapy, skills training, and substance-use support for athletes and executives.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and about your background.
So yeah, as you mentioned, I am, I'm, I'm a psychologist. I was trained in counseling psychology, and, uh, today I work primarily with high performers. And what that means is, uh, that could be like executives, you know, CEOs, uh, presidents of companies, people that are just trying to like achieve really high optimal levels of success, um, and then athletes. That's kind of how I started there. I was an athlete myself grew up in a family of athletes. And so I, I found myself now with this kind of specialty of, you know, working with, within the field of sport and exercise psychology. And I'm also a professor, you know, so that's kind of a, a unique position where I'm, I'm also doing some research and training kind of future providers in this field. Decided to start swimming, and I just kind of gave up the other sports and just focused on swimming and earned, you know, scholarship and You know, like I said, compete at the highest level in this Olympic sport of swimming.
Oh man, that's, that's cool, man. That's what's up. So Doc, as the director of behavioral health and wellness for Rutgers University Athletics, what does this role entail?
So it's a comprehensive program. I mean, CJ, you know, the world's different today and we talk about mental health in a way that we never did. And I'm sure, you know, no matter where you live in the world, you know, we're recognizing the importance of mental health.. And so the role, I created it in a way. There was one sports psychologist at the university. And I've, I'm also a sports psychologist at Seton Hall University and have a private practice. And we sort of consult and help other organizations build systems to provide both mental health and mental skills training, you know, for athletes. But I started at Seton Hall when I was studying for my PhD. We built, we started to build a program there. At Rutgers, when I was a professor, there was one sports psychologist for many years, you know, 15, 20 years. There was one person, you know, there was 4 or 5 different people, but there was only one provider. And right before COVID there was this gap because the person had to take leave. And I came in, like, the chief medical officer knew I was a professor and said, hey, can you fix this thing and build a system? You know, because obviously no system can function on one person. So that's the long answer to then say, like, this whole behavioral health and sports psychology unit I built is— it's comprehensive. So it's mental health treatment, it's group therapy, it's group skills, like, you know, recovering from an injury, for example. It's substance use, it's learning, and, you know, other psychological evaluations. So there's lots of things that psychologists do, and our team does all of it. And so we have a whole team of people that kind of oversee all these different areas.
