This article started as a research project diving into what sports psychology programs nationwide are doing to help athletes with their mental health. However, it has quickly become a critique of these programs for one main reason: they don’t really work.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a handful of schools with programs to support athletes. However, this small amount of programs don’t make a dent in the greater issue facing collegiate athletics right now — the mental health of student-athletes. There are some programs dedicated to supporting collegiate athletes’ mental health at various colleges, including right here at USC. Still, they are buried underneath piles of false promises from the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Within college athletics, there are resources to support the athletes’ physical health — trainers, physical therapists, nutritionists and coaches of all kinds get paid to maintain the physical ability of these 18- to 23-year-olds. It is their job to build athletes, no matter the cost, and the pressure only increases as they push through the season. The money is in the muscle, and with this unfortunate fact comes the reality that programs dedicated to a kind of health you can’t see won’t get funding. The brain is an organ, after all, not a muscle.

Suppose the NCAA is the federal government of college athletics. The federal government is responsible for creating the laws of the land, and leaves some duties up to the states to decide for themselves how to do their business.

In that hypothetical, the issue of mental health within athletics is a law left up to the states because it would fall under the categories of health, safety and welfare. Each state (college) has the right to build programs for athletes’ mental health — but the lack of these programs goes unchecked.

The NCAA has plenty of resources to get programs started, but because the association does not mandate every college to implement these resources into action, no change can occur. Program blueprints hide inside a 36-page PDF describing all the “best practices” for helping struggling athletes. Remember USC’s $7 billion media rights deal with the Big 10?  Another parallel to the federal government’s management of their money. The cash is out there, it is just funneled into the pockets of football coaches and not to the general welfare of the student-athletes.

If you’ve ever spiraled down the rabbit hole that is WebMD, then you know that words on a page won’t solve an athlete’s mental health crises. Many times, words actually exacerbate the issue.

The NCAA needs to understand that for positive change to occur on the athlete level, it needs to require colleges to establish mental health programs within their athletic departments. Once this feat has been accomplished, we can get into the nitty-gritty of what is required to ensure the programs remain effective.

Existing programs are primarily aimed to be available when the athlete feels the need to reach out. This format of aid, while effective in many ways, caters to athletes who reach out for help to take advantage of the resource. On the flip side, it dismisses athletes who are uncomfortable asking for help in this way. To be so successful at your sport that you can continue to play at such a high level is an immense amount of pressure, and many student-athletes are so used to this pressure that it is easy to dismiss it as “just what I need to do to get the job done.”

The way that current support systems for student-athlete’s mental health are designed is especially harmful to male student-athletes, who are less likely to come forward with concerns about their mental state until it is too late.

“Most of those who died by suicide were male (78%),” according to the California Violent Death Reporting System.

Just because a program exists doesn’t mean students will take advantage of its resources. The only way to ensure a happier, healthier student-athlete population is even harder to implement than the program itself: mandatory meetings with a mental health specialist. This protocol would ensure student-athletes can share their struggles with professionals and get help when problems arise.

When we think of a person going through some sort of mental health crisis, we think of them as visibly struggling. This “hot mess” persona is impossible to find in the student-athlete community because — for lack of a better term — you really have to have your shit together to balance so many commitments.

College athletes are known to be some of the most hardworking, dedicated and time-efficient people on campus. With practices, lift, film and various additional workouts piled on top of the struggles a “normal” college student deals with — classes, homework, attempting to have a balanced social life — it is near impossible to succeed without any help whatsoever.

And yet, we still wonder why college student-athletes suffer from secret mental health problems. The support systems put in place by the NCAA are inadequate, and if colleges don’t come together to build established programs for athletes’ mental health, there will be no athletes left to compete.

Dana Hammerstrom is a junior writing about the mental health of collegiate athletes and the emotional pressures they face in her column, “Heart to Heart,” which runs every other Tuesday.