The coronavirus pandemic continues to impact all aspects of the daily life of the public worldwide. With decreased economic activity, the sports industry faces significant challenges of maintaining athletes’ mental health while seeking the best strategies for eventual return to sports competition.

We aim to evaluate COVID-19 related factors impacting on the mental health of athletes and provide appropriate management steps.

We examined MeSH terms “Athletes,” “Sports,” “COVID-19,” in the context of “Mental Health,” “Mental Disorders,” “Behavioral Medicine,” “Risk Factors.” We identified seven studies for the qualitative synthesis per the PRISMA guidelines, searching Medline, PubMed, PubMed Central, and PsychInfo databases until July 2020.

The pandemic has negatively impacted athletes’ mental wellbeing due to decreased physical activities, limited resources, fears, and delays or cancellations of the sporting event. The negative psychological impact on athletes is due to self-isolation measures leading to worries of less preparedness for the lockdown, reduced physical activity, loss of competitive advantages, fear of being infected, social isolation, and loneliness. During this period, athletes struggled to maintain baseline routine and engaged in excessive calorie intake, eating low-quality food, substance use, and sleep disruption. It has caused anxiety, depression, PTSD, and mood disorder at varying degrees of severity in athletes.

Limited resources during a pandemic have caused adverse mental impact on athletes. We recommend improving physical activity through confined or virtual training programs with colleagues. A collaborative approach is required by clinicians, psychologists, coaches, sports organizations, government bodies to limit the pandemic’s mental health impact.

Athletes have participated in sports and physical exercise for several decades as a coping strategy to alleviate mental health and behavioral issues. The increasing prevalence of psychiatric disorders among athletes attributed to the failure of its appropriate management.

Our goal is to identify barriers in diagnosing and treating psychiatric problems among sportspersons to educate clinicians about the potential risk factors for athletes’ mental health disorders to provide optimal medical care.

We examined MeSH terms “Athletes,” “Sports,” “Risk Factors,” “Diagnosis,” and “Patient Care Management,” in the context of “Mental Health,” “Mental Disorders,” “sports psychiatry,” and “diagnostic barriers.” We included 23 studies per the PRISMA guidelines, searching Medline, PubMed, PubMed Central, and PsychInfo databases until August 2020.

Barriers managing psychiatric disorders in athletes are overtraining syndrome, compensatory training, idolizing, negative coping mechanisms, social stigma, injuries, and performance-enhancing supplements usage. Other factors attributed to diagnostic barriers are general perceptions, age, racial and gender disparities, poor health services, interpersonal issues, patient-therapist relationships, sense of entitlement, control or confidentiality problems, and lack of quality preventative measures. Risk factors are injuries, sports type, doping, substance abuse, lifestyle, failures in achievement, eating disorders, and maladaptive coping mechanisms.

These barriers in psychiatric care have adversely impacted the mental health of sportspersons. Athletes have deviated from their careers and lost valuable periods of their lives due to inadequate attention to sports psychiatry aspects, such as cognitive health services, inclusive sports management measures, diagnostic and treatment approaches, reliable mental health services, and public awareness programs.