Love and basketball: Audience response to a professional athlete’s mental health proclamation

Abstract

Objective: On 6 March 2018, the Cleveland Cavaliers power forward Kevin Love penned an op-ed for The Players’ Tribune. In big, bold letters, the title, ‘Everyone Is Going Through Something’ gave way to his proclamation of personal mental health struggles. This study assessed the impact of Love’s personal mental health testimony on the audience. Design: Content analysis of Instagram user’s responses to Love’s 2018 announcement of panic disorder. Setting: Data were collected on 19 June 2018. Comments on Love’s post were manually copied into an Excel spreadsheet. Due to Instagram’s ‘top comments’ and ‘newest first’ algorithms that determine both the visibility and order of user responses, not all comments were accessible for analysis. A total of 1,234 comments served as the sample. Method: Two trained coders analysed the comments for exhibitions of audience involvement with Love, emotional responses and perceptions of social biases surrounding mental illness. Results: Social media users who expressed hope were more likely to share their own mental health experiences. In addition, users who expressed hope were significantly more likely to mention wanting to reduce social bias surrounding discussion of mental health than posts without hope. Conclusion: Building on previous work that determined social media users can respond to a celebrity’s physical health testimonial with positive, future-oriented emotions, this study established that the same response can exist when analysing a celebrity’s mental health testimonial.