Sport Injury and Grief Responses: A Review

There is an increasing awareness within the sport-related literature of the importance of psychological factors in the rehabilitation of injured athletes. This awareness and subsequent investigations have led to the proposed application of grief response models to injury. However, to date limited attention has been paid to the clinical psychology literature on grief. The purpose of this paper is to redress this oversight by providing a review of the most relevant literature on the psychological responses of injured athletes in light of the philosophical and empirical research into loss and grief in the clinical literature. As a result of this review, a number of issues are raised for future research into grief models of injury.