Hi Everyone,
As many of you know, mental health is an issue that is incredibly important to me, recently, I decided to learn more about what teams around Major League Baseball are doing to provide better mental health care to their players in 2025. I sat down with the mental health coordinator of the New York Mets, Dr. Tess Palmateer. We covered a lot of ground in our half-hour on Zoom, and I’m excited to share our conversation with you now. You can choose between watching our conversation above, listening to wherever you get your podcasts, or reading the transcript, which is included below.
This was a very exciting opportunity, and I am glad I get to share it with you now. As Not From Boston grows, which I hope it will, your support will continue to be everything to me. Please like, share, or forward this newsletter, promote it on social media, and as always, please subscribe if you haven’t already.
Here’s my conversation with Dr. Palmateer:
Transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Bennett Weinschenk: Dr. Palmateer, Thank you so much for being here. I wanted to start with a question that I find myself asking friends of mine or people that I meet, especially now that I've worked in the film industry for the last few years. And the difference between what people think I do and what I actually do is pretty massive. And so I'm curious. What do people think you do? And what do you do?
Dr. Tess Palmateer: Yes. That's a question I get all the time. When I say I'm a sports psychologist, and people go “Oh, cool. Hmm! So what is that? Exactly?” So I think some people have the sense that, yes, I'm available to provide therapy to players, also doing some of the more performance enhancement. So how I describe my role is providing mental health care for all of our players, helping them get connected to the best mental health care that could be our internal resources, or connecting to folks in the community the role I'm in currently with the Mets. I'm the mental health coordinator, so in this role, my primary responsibility is mental health care. At our organization, we distinguish between mental health and mental performance, and so in previous roles I've held, I've done both. So making sure our well-being is on point navigating situations outside of sport, but as well as I should say, how do we perform at a high level and do so consistently? So I've been in this role for about a year now so still sort of learning. And while we, as an organization, again, we kind of distinguish between mental health and mental performance, we recognize that there is so much overlap, and oftentimes players can benefit from working with both departments and even for us to collaborate. So yeah, I don't know if people have a good sense of what I do, perhaps. With things becoming a little bit more commonplace in in media people have a better sense. But yeah, again, mental health care for our players is the primary role.
BW: Did you grow up a baseball fan, or were you a Mets fan before you had a chance to work for the organization, or are sports just broadly speaking, just your thing?
Dr. P: Yeah. So I grew up definitely a sports fan. I'm actually originally from Canada, so I’m doing all of the stereotypes right by saying that my dad was a professional hockey player. We grew up in a hockey family, and he had retired by the time I was born, but then took on the role of scouting. So hockey was kind of what we talked about. I would go to the rink with him sometimes. From a playing standpoint, I kind of played everything growing up in high school. I played basketball, cross country, volleyball, soccer golf, tons of different teams. But once I got to college, volleyball was my primary sport. I still play a little bit of pickup here and there, but I'd say the sport I play most commonly now recreationally, of course, is golf.
I did not spend a ton of time in the baseball community. So there that's been quite the learning curve of just some of the nuances of the culture and the people involved in baseball. But what I think is really cool about my role is that much of the well-being and even performance principles can be applied across various sports. So while there's been a learning curve, a lot of what I do can be done across sports, which is really great.
BW: And what so what are some of those those nuances that make baseball a little different?
Dr. P: I think the Minor League system is very unique, right? We don't see players get drafted, and then in the Big Leagues that following year, like we might see in some other sports. So with it, taking maybe 4 plus years for players to navigate their way through the Minor League system, that's one big nuance.
I think the makeup of our players is fairly unique. We have, of course, our domestic players, many coming from the US. We got a couple of fellow Canadians on board at the Mets. But then we also have a really big Latin population. So we have folks coming from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, and so forth. So stepping into this role, I knew we had folks from all over, but I think it really hit me when I was thinking about the difference between working in a college space which I had previously to this space. If folks were enrolling in a US University, they needed to have some sort of English proficiency. That's not always the case here. We have some players coming that have had very minimal exposure to English, to put it broadly, so I think that has put a lot of emphasis in our organization on how even we, as English-speaking staff, how can we learn Spanish, make an effort, get to know their culture? So I think that that has been an interesting kind of difference as well, and even their journey they might be in our Academy for a couple of years, and then navigate their way to the US. So those are a couple of things that I think are a little bit unique about baseball.
BW: The Minor League system on its own is a huge difference as a whole other thing. I mean, it's a whole other league. I can understand how that is definitely going to take some adjustment.
So what drew you to the to the mental health piece of it?
Dr. P: It's funny because I did not know what I wanted to do from a career standpoint, probably till midway through my undergrad. I went to college just thinking I'd like to play volleyball. It was actually during that time that I struggled myself on the court. I was struggling with my confidence. Like many athletes. We are, y’know, our own worst critic.
During that time my dad had shared, “You know,” he's saying, “During our scouting process, we're working with this sports psychologist, and maybe you could connect with her.” And I said I'll take any help I can get, please. So I met with her, and I was a psychology undergrad student at the time, but didn't really know what I wanted to do with it. I thought psychology was fascinating, and having grown up in the world of sports, I thought “This is outstanding. I can do both.” That was where it really all clicked for me. And I was like, “Okay, I need to find myself into these sports psychology classes, and figure out what the next step will be.” In this case, I pursued my master's after the undergrad, so that sort of locked me in, and at first, I really thought, I just wanted to do the performance stuff. “How can we perform at a high level? How do we be consistent? How do we go from good to great?”
It probably wasn't until I did my PhD at the University of North Texas, where it was a counseling psychology program. It was during that time that I was thinking like, “Wow, you know, how are we expecting players to meet all of these demands if they're not okay off the field or off the court,” and recognizing, too, sometimes in these positions, folks look at them and think, “Wow! They've got everything you know. What could they be sad about, or what would what would even stress them out? They got more money than anything.” And then, sitting and chatting with them, sort of recognizing that they're going through some of the similar stressors that we everyday people are going through.
So I think again, it really goes back to my undergrad that exposure there. But if I rewind even further, I remember sitting in the rink with my dad back when Palm Pilots were a thing, and I'm entering some scores with him and asking, “Why do you like this guy over this guy?” And he's pointing out some behaviors, like look at what this guy’s doing on the bench, or how this guy goes into the corner. And he was really all talking about the mental. He knew everything from the physical or skill standpoint, but he was really digging in and asking coaches about the players, so I think, even from a young age I was really curious about the mental side of sports.
BW: The point you made about the stakes of performance, and people saying, “You know, players have it all.” Something. I’m definitely guilty of myself. But as I was preparing for this, I was kind of thinking about how, for us, in the workplace, if we make a mistake, the repercussions of those mistakes stay within that workplace, you know, between us and our supervisor or coworkers. But when, for example, Aaron, Judge drops a fly ball in the World Series on this massive stage, where millions of people are watching like that is going to stay with him for the rest of his career. And I'm just curious how in your experience, how do players cope with that? How do they deal? And do you have a role in helping them navigate that?
Dr. P: Yes. So one of my education sessions that I'm going to be doing with our players this year is really navigating how social media can impact mental health and well-being. So some literature has already been explored. You know, what does mindless scrolling do? And how does that impact us? That's kind of a different can of worms. But depending on the player, maybe what level they're at or what round they were drafted in, there are so many eyes on them. So after a rough game, if they go check Twitter, or look at Instagram, or start just even looking at news articles like.
BW: You're gonna see some not-so-pretty things.
Dr. P: Something that I've been exploring and we've been talking internally about is, yeah, what can we do to better support our players? One strategy, of course, is, you know, after a bad game, don't go directly to Twitter and search your name. Whether it's a bad game or not. I do try to teach folks to be mindful of what they’re consuming because it does impact the way we think, and the way we're evaluating social comparisons. Something that I think is really cool, that the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee are doing, what are these resources that can essentially prevent some of the online abuse? So I'd be happy to share some articles with you. So I'm blanking on what the name of the app is called. But one of my colleagues, Jeff Rooser, had presented at the MLB mental health meetings this summer. Some of that information was funded by the NCAA, and now [MLB] putting it into practice so we can kind of prevent the negative comments from going on to people's posts, or just the harassment that takes place. Because you've probably seen it's not just comments about their play, but it does get pretty nasty. So trying to think about what we as an organization can do to protect our players and limit the exposure to some of that stuff that is likely gonna impact their well-being.
BW: I would love to hear about the stigma (of mental health) and how masculinity stands in the way sometimes of mental health in sports.
Dr. P: Course, great question. Even reflecting on my time from undergrad to where I am in my career now I don't even know if there was an undergraduate college counseling center on campus. I didn't think I had a teammate who had a mental health concern, and we sure as heck never talked about it. So that was not that long ago, like less than maybe a decade ago. And-
BW: That’s still not that long ago!
Dr. P: Right?! So it is even just thinking about my career journey, the amount that mental health has increased in being talked about is incredible, and I think in college spaces there's been some policies in place that have really pushed for mental health care. There's been various campaigns like Holinsky's Hope does a great job of pushing Student-Athlete Mental Health Week and creating conversations around mental health and increasing resources for student-athletes.
But then, even in the pro space. I mean the professional athletes who are speaking out about mental health. They're just doing tremendous work, again these “folks who have it all”, who are these sort of invincible heroes, if they can speak out about struggles that they've had, and how it was helpful to ask for help, that’s going to go a long way. So folks like Kevin Love to DeMar DeRozan, Michael Phelps, three amazing male athletes, they've all spoken out about this and done some really cool work in the mental health space as well. And actually reminds me, too, I just read this article, the the title was something along the lines of “Michael Phelps is Pleading with Men to Go to Therapy”, and in that he talks about how he didn't want to ask for help because it felt like a sign of weakness. And maybe he was giving his competitors an edge. In some ways, I get that people hate asking for help and men, a lot of men are socialized to think “I got to tough it out. I'll figure it out on my own. Don't ask for help.”
My big approach is trying to shift how we're thinking about mental health. Why is that so different? Because if you are struggling with your swing, you would probably go talk to your coach about it. You'd probably watch film. You'd go into the cages to get some extra work, whatever it might be. But if we're struggling from a mental health standpoint, asking for help seems odd. So I try to point out those discrepancies. So I think, being in this space has been a challenge, if I'm being transparent, right? This we know, that men are less likely to ask for help. I mean, even the literature shows that men’s help-seeking behavior is just lower than women's. I put in work to sort of build relationships with players and earn their trust. Then we think about the layer of sport, and know the “no crying in baseball” quote, you know, what sort of messaging are players receiving both implicitly and pretty explicitly at times? I think for me, trying to bring awareness to our staff so that they can reinforce well-being and some folks, both players and staff, have been pretty outstanding of like, “Hey? Well, I spoke to Tess, and it was really helpful”, or “During my playing career I struggled with XY and Z.” And so I think the more we talk about it we can break down the stigma, but even to go with a whole other layer, we have so many players coming from other countries where mental health isn't even talked about, so if I say I'm the mental health provider they're like, “Oh, I don't want to even be associated with you. I don't want people to think I'm crazy.” So there's a lot of education that goes into place as well, and just trying to be patient and meet folks where they're at.
BW: Yeah, I totally agree with just, talking about it more and getting it out in the open to destigmatize all the kinds of aspects of of mental health. I, for one, was really struggling last year with depression. And then I did TMS, which I was very scared of going in, because it felt pretty intense, and now I won't shut up about it. I'm just like not only did it work, and that in and of itself is kind of a miracle. But it's just kind of crazy cool like magnets somehow make your brain better. It's awesome and just not being really afraid of judgment in a weird way, It's been very empowering.
Dr. P: Yes, it was one of my favorite things. When I was working in the college space, I'd be at lunch with football players or one of our teams, and I sit down and have lunch with them, and then someone else would be like, “Hey, Tess, we're meeting at 2 right?” Yell it in front of the whole team and in my head I'm like, “Yes, this is great,” and then someone else will look at me and be like, “How do I set up an appointment with you?” And just like that, the more we're able to be open about it, it can have such a such a cool impact. And it's one of my favorite things when people say like, “Oh, my therapist, insert-whatever-they-learned,” or “Oh, I can't. I got therapy.” Let's normalize that the same way we say “I gotta go to a dentist appointment,” you know.
BW: Yeah, I think I'm more overdue for a dentist appointment than I am for therapy. But point taken.
I would love to hear more about performance as it relates to mental health, because I did read your study on whether personality is a predictor, and I was curious about that.
Dr. P: I think it's pretty hard for me to say, conclusively, that mental health is directly correlated to performance. I think we can all, I mean even the names I just mentioned, Michael Phelps Kevin Love DeMar DeRozan, Simone Biles, the list goes on. Folks can still be doing really great things, even if they're not at a hundred percent or close to it with mental health. Where it's interesting, is sometimes sport is their safe place. So outside of sports, they might not be doing well, but sports is where they feel confident, where they feel safe, where they feel supported. So it's interesting and nuanced.
Where I think the correlation between good mental health and well-being and performance can come into place is sometimes, if we're not doing well from a mental health standpoint that could impact, let's say, our appetite. Maybe we're losing weight because we're not eating enough. That's going to increase our risk of injury. That's going to also increase or impact our energy availability. Maybe we're eating too much. And now we're overeating. We're gaining weight. We're losing some of our speed. It can impact our sleep if we're struggling with sleep. So when you haven't slept well, you're kind of cranky, things just aren't processing as quickly as they normally do. Those are just 2 examples. And so we also know depression or anxiety can impact our attention. Our information processing impacts the way we show up in our relationships, it's just in everything that we do. So from my perspective, something that I really try to push is mental health is a tool for performance. Excellence or mental health is a tool for excellence. On and off the field.
One of my colleagues, I can't remember the quote exactly, works with the USOPC. But he's said, “You know, we can all be really good. But why not be great? And if you're great, could you be even better?” And I think that mindset of like chasing excellence is a really cool way to frame it and moves away from the reactive deficit problem mentality that sometimes mental health holds. So if we are checking all the boxes, good sleep, good nutrition, we're feeling supported in our relationships, we’re content, our mood is great, we're able to focus, that's just gonna help performance. And then kind of diverting to the bit about personality, I think that that is fascinating. My research was for my dissertation so it was just like a snapshot. I was limited in what I could do, given publicly available statistics, and so not the top-notch quality that I would love to kind of engage in someday. But I think personality is generally a pattern of behaviors. We're assessing the likelihood of someone behaving in a certain way, but I don't think it's exactly this perfect correlation, and we all know. You can reflect on how you show up in your different relationships. You might be different with your parents than you are with a professor, and you're probably a little bit different between those two than you are with your best friend.
So you know, context, relationships, stress, those are all things that are going to impact us. So personality can be a piece of the puzzle or help us know how to support players. But at the end of the day, there are so many pieces that contribute to performance. I think our personality, or like our makeup, is just a part of it.
BW: Taking all of the things that we've talked about: social media, mental performance, personality, and stigma, when looking ahead five years from now, where do you hope sports mental health has evolved?
Dr. P: I think in my dream world, we would have plenty of resources available at our sports organizations. My hope is that people would be widely accepting of players and staff, utilizing the resources, and not have to be worried about how mental health, history, or treatment might impact their value as a player, “if I get traded and they know I'm taking antidepressants, is that gonna impact my value?” I would love for that to not be a question. I don't think we're there yet.
BW: Is [taking antidepressants] something that does impact the value of players?
Dr. P: Oh, I am so not involved in those conversations. There's just fear, right? Because if we think about the physical health component, if we're looking to acquire a player, we need availability. If they've had Tommy John surgery, where are we at? Or if they've had a number of strains or tears and surgeries, it does impact how they perceive them. It's all about risk management. And so I feel fortunate to be in an organization that really prioritizes mental health. And they really, in my eyes, I feel like we really care about our players as people. And that's why they brought me in. And we've been able to build up our resources. And by resources, I mean even people power. But I'm getting the resources to do that. And so I think it's something that we really value. But again, I'm not in conversations behind closed doors, and I don't even know how other organizations are.
BW: Right. No, I didn't mean to assume otherwise. When you said concern about antidepressants and value, that kind of threw me for a second.
Dr. P: Sorry. Sorry it’s again one of those sometimes unfounded fears, but knowing, too, that this is folks’ livelihood. They're trying to be as protective as they can be.
BW: My last question for you. And this has been fantastic, by the way. My last question is: What are you most proud of from your work in 2024? And what is one of your goals for 2025?
Dr. P: Okay, I gonna try to think on the fly on this one.
2024. I came into the Mets with a vision of what I wanted to build, how I can support players, and what policies I can have in place, but I think what I did a a pretty good job at was just sort of slowing down and building relationships. It was my intention to get to know the players and provide a little bit of information about what resources we have available. But also, just “How are you? Like, you just became a father. How is that?” “Holy cow, after you know X number of months you got to throw the ball today. How did it feel?” And I think, just really building those relationships with players. And then I also feel really lucky to have done that with our staff as well. We have some really wonderful staff, and having to just sit down and have these conversations and get to know each other and share meals together. I think we've been mutually able to kind of grow. And so that's been pretty cool. I think I've learned. I don't think, I have learned a ton over the last year. But really all starts with just connecting as people.
What's my goal, or what am I looking forward to for 2025?
BW: Yeah, what is one of your goals for 2025?
Dr. P: Okay. Two-parter, a personal goal. I need to improve my Spanish. I'm very lucky, that we get some support with that from our organization. And so I will text my teacher back right now, actually. But I want to improve my Spanish, and I say that because we have so many players that, again, are coming from other countries, and they’re immersed into this culture very quickly. I can only imagine how overwhelming that is, and so for me to be able to connect with them, I think, will go a long way if I can ease their transition, and also just demonstrate that I care about them just as much as I care about our domestic players.
And with that, I'm also really excited. We are able to hire a new contracted provider who is bilingual. So now we'll have someone in-house that can build the relationships, and meet them where they're at when we do educational sessions. We don't have to pull in a translator, because it's not the smoothest, right? So I think
I am so excited to broaden our reach this year. I feel like I have my feet underneath me, have some really good relationships, and will just build from what's gone on this last almost exactly a year, actually.
BW: That sounds so exciting. And I wish you guys the best of luck with that and I mean, I am a Red Sox fan, but good luck to the Mets.
Dr. Tess Palmateer, thank you so much for your time today I really appreciate it. This has been so much fun.
Dr. P: Yes, agreed. Thank you so much for having me always happy to connect. So thank you.
BW: Thank you so much.
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