Editorial: Mental health challenges in elite sport: balancing risk with reward

Mental health is a global societal challenge. Sport, more specifically, elite sport, offers a potential window into the mental health challenges of young people. We initiated this research topic by proposing that explanations for mental health disturbance in sport predominantly based on training load (e.g., mental health model, Raglin, 2001), overlooked the potential organizational stressors in the high performance sport environment and did not adequately account for sportrelated issues, including the consequences of injury, for non-normative transitions out of sport (Brewer and Redmond, 2017). In parallel with articles published in this research topic, recent research has advanced our knowledge of the prevalence of psychological disorders in elite sport, highlighting mental health issues among elite sport performers (e.g., Rice et al., 2016; Gouttebarge et al., 2017; Hagiwara et al., 2017). In light of this contemporary research, the present research topic on “Mental health challenges in elite sport: Balancing risk with reward” in Frontiers in Psychologymakes a contribution with 17 articles comprising original research, reviews, perspective features, and an abundance of commentaries on this important topic. Depression was a foremost concern highlighted in the articles included in this research topic, which was investigated with novel methodological approaches.