An Irish solution to a common problem

SPORTS PSYCHOLOGIST'S VIEW: Psychologists describe stress as a situation. People feel under stress when the demands of a challenge outweigh their resources to cope. There are a variety of manifestations of such stress: distraction, anxiety, depression, ill-health, and breakdowns in social relations. The Roy Keane situation is a classic case of mismanaging stress, suggests Brian Hughes

When World Cups happen, stress happens. Athletes at the top of their professions are faced with the opportunity to perform at the highest levels of their sport. The gap between the challenges and the resources is at its widest.

Roy Keane was unhappy with the arrangements made for preparing for one of the greatest professional challenges of his life. He lacked the training facilities he felt he needed to cope with the challenge, and he also lacked the personal resources to rectify the situation. By all accounts, he repeatedly voiced his concerns about such matters for a number of years but as far as he could see, the FAI failed to respond. In his own words, it was like banging his head off a brick wall.

To appropriately manage stress, one has to tackle the person's challenges, resources, or both. Instead of alleviating challenges or increasing coping resources, the Irish management decided to deny the former and actually reduce the latter. They denied there were any problems, and blamed Keane for pointing problems out, thus removing any social or emotional support that would have helped to rectify the situation. Not uncommonly, what took place was an exacerbation of stress rather than its amelioration.

Psychologists have been assisting top athletes at the highest level of international sport for decades. Not so for the Irish football team. In one sense, the absence of team psychologists in Irish international football highlights the Keane problem in two ways.

Firstly, the presence of a psychologist may have helped defuse the situation. Secondly, the fact that a major international football team would seek to prepare for the world's most significant sporting event without any psychological support from trained professionals only typifies the low levels of professionalism that frustrated Keane in the first place.

In a broader sense, these events serve as a lesson for Irish society. In Ireland certain things are considered socially unacceptable, not least of which is the man who complains that he is emotionally at bursting point.

In Ireland, we are considered to have a supportive society and a strong sense of community. However, psychologists have always been sceptical about this. We have among the highest rates of stress-related diseases (for example, heart disease) in the developed world, the highest rates of problem drinking in Europe, high rates of adult male depression, and more suicide deaths than road deaths.

The management's response to the Keane situation served to exaggerate the problems it was trying to solve, and highlighted the unsympathetic, pull-yourself-together approach of Irish society to people's problems.

True, Keane didn't help matters when he succumbed to his short temper. However, the least that can be expected is that management provide the resources necessary to deal with problems rather than to take them away. It wouldn't happen in the England squad.

Dr Brian Hughes is a stress specialist and lecturer in psychology at the National University of Ireland in Galway