Maryland guard Brinae Alexander says body criticism, which often strays into overt sexism, is a problem that can be difficult to cope with on social media.

Coaches are on the front line of how student-athletes cope with social media-related stress. The picture they paint isn’t a pretty one.

“You hear good things (via social media) one day, and the next day it’s all tumbling down on you. A lot of these cats, they just can’t mentally take it. It’s sad,” Indiana men’s basketball coach Mike Woodson said in January. “Social media is not going anywhere. I’ve just got to, from a coaching standpoint, when I catch a guy that’s down or he’s going through some situations, man, I just hope he comes and talks to me where we can possibly get him help, and they’re not out on the limb by themselves.”

Woodson’s observations are backed up by the psychologists who are trained to deal with the issue. Social-media related stress has increased interaction between athletes and the sports psychologists most Division I athletic programs provide.

“In terms of rates in which people are coming in talk about it, a large majority, it’s woven in some way or another,” Purdue assistant director of counseling and sports psychologist Kelsey Dawson said. “I would struggle to say a specific number, but of the number of athletes I’ve seen? It’s come up in conversations, whether it is stress being on there or being on there impacting sleep, ability to focus or creating stress.”

So what happens when an athlete agrees to seek help? How is it treated?

Indiana University professor and sports psychologist Jesse Steinfeldt has devoted his professional life to athlete well-being, and coping with social media has quickly become paramount in his field.

Steinfeldt and Indiana doctoral candidate Jeffrey S. Ruser wrote a chapter called “It’s a Contact Sport: The Psychological Impact of Social Media In Sport” for the Routledge Handbook of Clinical Sports Psychology.

For generations, there was a negative stigma attached to seeking help for mental-health issues. This was especially true for athletes, who live in a world where “toughness” – as defined by the notion fighting through anything that gets in the way of winning being a badge of honor – is a cherished trait.

Steinfeldt feels those walls of perception that prevented treatment are fading with the current generation of athletes. Steinfeldt cited public acknowledgement of mental-health issues expressed by NBA players Kevin Love and Demar DeRozan and gymnast Simone Biles in breaking down barriers.

Still, players fear repercussions for seeking help.

“The culture of athletics sort of stymies the resolve to seek help, but we’re seeing an erosion of that stigma with this generation is a positive trend,” Steinfeldt said. “The other part of that then becomes for me as a player to tell my coach. It’s hard because (the coach) evaluates my playing time, they may use that against me, intentionally or unintentionally. Believing (the athlete) is weak or not mentally tough.”

That’s what makes the role of the sports psychologist important. They are a safe harbor for athletes, and at least by definition, are supposed to act independently of the program and any motives it might have that would deter a player from improving their mental health.

“The beauty of a sports psychologist, I don’t put pen to lineup card. I’m not your mom or dad. I’m invested in you, in so much as I want to see you become the best version of yourself,” Steinfeldt said.

The science behind the help starts with the science of the brain itself. Digital interaction for all age groups, and the affect it has on the brain, is a very much uncharted territory.

“The neuroscience behind having a smartphone and using some of these apps, especially from a very young age, it does a lot to the brain, and that can be a challenge to overcome,” Dawson said. “We know the frontal lobe deals with a lot of personality, but also planning, inter-motor movement, but also, impulsivity.

“(The frontal lobe) doesn’t fully develop until we’re 25, so if we’re starting to use phones that impact that area of the brain from an early age, a decade-plus before the brain is fully developed? It changes the circuitry a little bit.”

Sports psychologists acknowledge the science behind the impact of social-media use is still in its infancy, so to treat an athlete who has social-media anxiety, it starts with a traditional approach.

“Part of it is approaching from a collaborative perspective. When you come at from a paternalistic, I-know-best perspective, they’re not going to respond well to that,” said Purdue director of counseling and sports psychologist Brad Foltz, a pupil of Steinfeldt’s at Indiana. “I try to come at it from the perspective of what it’s doing for you. What is affecting you in a way that’s not as effective or useful, and let’s see what changes and ways that will work for you.”

Steinfeldt noted the therapy process itself has built-in goals regardless of what the mental-health issue might be. Steinfeldt said it’s important to have a “holistic understanding” of who the athlete is, which creates a level of trust between therapist and subject.

When it comes to social media specifically, the prevailing place psychologists want their patients to get to is to compartmentalize the stresses social media can cause.

“How do you compartmentalize, to appreciate the value of (social media), and to anticipate the negative component of it, but not to internalize it?” Steinfeldt said. “So don’t take that, whatever, so-and-so is saying, that’s his stuff, right? If he’s chirping at you, that might be his projection.

“So how do I not let that be internalized something about me? It’s a single tail thing. How do I absorb the positive but disregard the negative on some level? So that all comes out of compartmentalization and helping them understand and normalize this process.”

Boundaries are important, too.

“It’s almost to some degree of that (social media) is almost another person in that regard. Is it healthy? What are we getting from it? Are there ways we can alter our relationship with it? It would be very behavioral in that approach,” Dawson said.

Not all athletes have the same type of social-media anxiety. Some have a hard time dealing with the anonymous criticism. Others cope with not getting enough validation, at least in comparison with some of their teammates.

It’s also important to put into perspective how super-charged social media interaction is versus person-to-person communication. There is nothing in the human experience to this point in our history that provides a road map for the mass reaction prominent student-athletes experience now via social media.

“I would talk to them about managing the emotional reactions and work on gaining perspective,” Dawson said. “An example might be, ‘I’m not getting the followers my teammate has. I only had 100 likes.’ You give them the perspective of, ‘What if you had 100 people come up to you and say they liked your outfit?’

“That would feel pretty overwhelming, probably, and flattering, but that seems to have a bigger impact than dismissing only getting 100 likes on social media framework. We forget about the sheer number and how warped this gets interacting in-person versus interacting via an app.”

There’s another wrinkle to social media anxiety and treatment – body shaming. It occurs predominantly with female athletes, but both genders deal with the issue.

“I do a lot of work with body image and eating concerns. The filters and distortion that comes across on social media and the impact it is, a large majority being young women, but young men, too, feeling like they have to look like this and all of the behind-the-scenes things that go into those posts can really do a number on someone’s mental health,” Dawson said.

Maryland women’s basketball player Brinae Alexander said body criticism, which often strays into overt sexism, is a problem that can be difficult to cope with on social media.

“I’ve had former teammates that have had to deal with it. Men don’t have to deal with people caring about how they look. In women’s basketball, there was Tamari Key on Tennessee and people commenting on her lashes and that kind of stuff instead of getting rebounds,” Alexander said.

The science behind treating social-media related mental-health issues will continue to evolve as social media itself continues to change. Where this all leads to is an open question.

“(College-aged people) are gaining stuff (mentally), but they’re also losing stuff. And who knows how it ends up in the wash?” Steinfeldt said. “I don’t know where this goes down the road. Does this sort of flatten itself out in a better way? Right now, it’s having a sort of rocky, tumultuous impact on mental health.”