Over a third of athletes screened positive for anxiety and depression

Exercise reliably helps prevent and treat anxiety and depression, which makes it tempting to assume athletes are protected by their sport. Yet competitive sport brings its own pressures: performance demands, scrutiny, injury risk and an identity tied tightly to results. Whether athletes actually experience anxiety and depression at meaningful rates, and whether that differs by level or type of sport, had been measured piecemeal across many separate studies. This review set out to pool those numbers into one clear picture of how common these problems are among athletes who are not currently injured.

The authors searched PubMed, Embase and Web of Science from inception to August 18, 2025 for studies of athletes at any level, from high school and collegiate through amateur to elite. Eligible studies reported either the prevalence or the incidence of moderate to severe anxiety or depressive symptoms, or formal diagnoses of these disorders. Two reviewers assessed the quality of each study, and results were pooled with separate analyses by sporting level and type of sport. In total, 64 studies covering 131,840 athletes were included.

Screening tools told a starker story than clinical diagnoses. Moderate to severe anxiety symptoms were found in 16% of athletes, depressive symptoms in 18%, and combined anxiety and depressive symptoms in 35%. The 12-month incidence of combined moderate to severe symptoms reached 40%, though that estimate rests on just 3 studies of 611 athletes. Formally diagnosed disorders were less common: 21% for anxiety, 6% for depression and 14% for the two combined, each drawn from a small number of studies.

These figures challenge the comfortable assumption that regular training inoculates athletes against mental health problems. The gap between screened symptoms and specialist diagnoses is itself a finding: many athletes report significant distress on questionnaires without ever receiving a formal diagnosis. That gap could reflect under-recognition, barriers to seeking help in sporting culture, or the known tendency of screening tools to flag more people than clinical interviews would. The review cannot say whether sport causes, worsens or merely coexists with these symptoms, which remains an open question.

If you compete at any level and struggle with anxiety or low mood, these numbers say you are far from alone, including at the elite end. Screening positive on a questionnaire is not a diagnosis, but it is a signal worth taking seriously rather than training through. For coaches, parents and teammates, the figures are a reason to treat mental health checks as a normal part of sport. Fitness, on this evidence, does not confer immunity.