May is Mental Health Month

Written by Kirby Maus

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a time to recognize how mental illness affects people at every level, from high school athletes to professionals competing on the world stage. In high school, students balance academics, social pressure, identity development, and competition, often without coping tools or support systems to manage stress effectively. That pressure mirrors elite sports, where performance expectations and public scrutiny can become overwhelming. Athletes like Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, and Michael Phelps have shown that success does not eliminate mental health challenges. Tiger Woods and Mike Tyson further demonstrate how pressure, trauma, injury, and public attention can deeply shape well-being over time. These examples help normalize conversations in schools, locker rooms, and workplaces where mental health influences performance, relationships, and long-term health.

It is important to understand the differences between coaching, counseling, and consulting in athletic and everyday environments. Coaching focuses on performance, accountability, and goal achievement, emphasizing measurable outcomes and skill development. Consulting provides expert advice, strategy, and problem-solving for specific challenges or systems. Counseling and psychotherapy go deeper, addressing emotional patterns, mental health concerns, and root causes of distress. Anyone can benefit from counseling because life is defined by constant change, and change often brings grief across both major and minor experiences that accumulate over time. We are all card-carrying members of the human race, perfectly imperfect, constantly a work in progress through phases, stages, chapters, and decades. We are all athletes in some form, and we all have potential, and potential is something we have not yet done.

When people rely on denial or compartmentalization, they may function in the short term, but these strategies often become self-defeating and personally, relationally, and professionally self-sabotaging. Avoided emotions do not disappear; they accumulate and surface in behavior, relationships, and performance. Counseling creates space for awareness, processing, and healthier coping, allowing individuals to move through change rather than around it.

Takeaway:
Mental, emotional, and spiritual health are not separate from life—they are how we live it. Growth requires awareness, support, and the courage to engage with change rather than avoid it.

Recommended Resources:

• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• How to Be an Adult by David Richo
• Leading Change by John Kotter
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

About Kirby Maus
Kirby Maus is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Board-Certified Chaplain Candidate… He honored his mother by proudly serving as her registered caregiver 24/7/365 for 11.5 years in the circle of life, which he describes as the best education and experience of his life in mental and human performance… Kirby is an alumnus of Arizona State University and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication… He worked in broadcast journalism for 15 years across 5 markets, covering sports, before transitioning fully into clinical and chaplaincy care… He writes in three-dot thoughts, just like Brad…

Kirby Maus