The NAA Mission For Mental Health

As athletes and especially as hockey players, we are tough, and more importantly, we are perceived as tough from everyone we know. We play through broken bones and cut faces, broken teeth and pulled muscles, we are warriors. 

 

Never to ask for help or to show any pain, we are programmed to keep quiet to just battle through it. For our mental health, this can be problematic. The highs are impossibly high, the lows, devastatingly low. The silence is deafening and it can get from just ok, to very bad in a matter of moments, but, we are here. Revealing your feelings is brave, and it takes courage. Courage of a team, of people with a common goal to help. 

 

None of us at the NAA are clinical psychologists or psychiatrists, but we are a team. We are a family with a common bond; a Nitehawk bond. We want our members, our teammates, our community, to know that we are here to listen, to talk, and to be there. A lot of us have gone through similar circumstances and we want you to know that you are not alone. 

 

There are a lot of mental health programs in Canada, and as an organization we want to be there to guide you in the right direction. 

 

Some references we think can be helpful: 

*Again we aren’t experts we just want to provide platforms that have been helpful to our current members. 

 

www.headsupguys.org has guidance on how to cope with depression, and how to look for the symptoms as well. 

 

www.drugsfreecanada.org is a resource on how to talk to kids/adults about substance abuse. 

 

 

The main thing, is that you’re not alone, the first step is talking to somebody about how you feel.