Mental Health Referral Network

MHRN’s highly skilled clinicians — selected because of their experience and success at helping manage the pressures of high performance sport — can deliver services ranging from improving your mental wellbeing  to comprehensive clinical treatment plans.

They can help with:

• Managing stress and anxiety
• Improving your relationships
• Depression
• Managing thoughts and emotions when transitioning into and out of sport
• Dealing with relocation
• Increasing your wellbeing to manage life’s stressful times
• Body image
• Concerns about COVID-19
• Maximising your wellbeing
• Worries affecting day-to-day life
• Negative thoughts and emotions
• Any other mental health concerns

MHRN services are available to:

• categorised athletes
• alumni
• coaches
• support staff engaged in the Daily Training Environment (DTE) (e.g. but not limited to physiotherapists, dieticians, medical staff, high performance directors and athlete wellbeing and engagement managers).

There can be a lot of overlap in the work that psychologists do whether it's in a sports or mental health setting. Psychologists that work in a sport or Institute/Academy will generally help with issues directly impacting on your sporting performance and are mostly based in the daily training environment. This may include some mild mental health difficulties.

The psychologists and psychiatrists from the MHRN will work with you on your overall wellbeing including mental health issues that may be affecting areas outside of your sport performance (e.g. anxiety or mood difficulties that are beginning to negatively affect your relationships). They are based in the community outside of the daily training environment.

Whether you reach out to someone within your sport or to the MHRN, the most important thing is that you take the first step in getting the support you need and connect with a professional that can help.

We are happy to receive enquiries from across the high performance system. If it turns out that you are not eligible for the MHRN, our dedicated team will be pleased to provide further information and advice about alternative mental health support that you can access.

The AIS MHRN can not offer assessment or medication management services for neurodiversity diagnoses (including ADHD) and these services need to be sourced through other services.

The AIS MHRN was designed to support individuals presenting with mild to moderate mental health conditions and was not designed to support long term conditions like ADHD and neurodiversity presentations which often require specialised assessment and lifelong management.

The MHRN is a voluntary service which means we only work with people who provide their consent. Your information is protected by law which we take very seriously. When you talk to us, what you say is confidential. This means we can only pass information on with your consent. There are some exceptions to this. If we’re seriously worried about your safety or the safety of others we are legally required to keep everyone safe. This means we might have to share our concerns with someone else.

We are also publicly funded. This means we sometimes need to provide reports that include population-level information (e.g. how many people have accessed the service in the last year). This is the same in most health services and we never provide client names or information that could identify an individual when we provide these types of reports.

Talk to your MHRN clinician about confidentiality to make sure you understand how it works.