Meldrum is hardly the only college athlete to experience such debilitating depression. Data from the NCAA and American College Health Association, interviews with athletic trainers and clinical psychologists, and conversations with former college athletes reveal that a growing number of student athletes are struggling with mental health issues that often go untreated.

To be sure, college students as a whole are facing an epidemic of depression; the American College Health Association reported in 2013 that 31.3 percent of undergraduates surveyed felt “so depressed it was difficult to function,” and 7.4 percent admitted to seriously considering suicide. Meanwhile, a 2013 National Survey of Counseling Center Directors found that the ratio of college counsellors to students was 1 to 1,604; and a 2009 Healthy Minds Study revealed that just 22 percent of depressed college students received “minimally adequate treatment.”

While statistics for student athletes are not broken out, these young adults face distinctive pressures that can trigger or exacerbate a mental illness, and may require more specialized attention and treatment. Unlike the rest of the student body, college athletes—particularly those participating in the most competitive Division I category—must manage a full-time sports career while being full-time students. A 2010 NCAA survey on the “student-athlete experience” shows that undergraduates playing DI sports devote upwards of 32 hours per week to the game. Along with the extended hours come special deprivations that can wreak psychological havoc: weekends, vacations, family milestones, and summers are given over to the sport. First-time college athletes also experience a special kind of shock that comes from starting at the bottom; they quickly discover that every teammate was once a player-of-the week in high school, and that no competition is ever just for fun. Further, their athletic futures depend on the whims of the head coach, who may or may not be sensitive or fair-minded. When their college athletic careers end—and in sports other than baseball, less than two percent of the roughly 450,000 NCAA-student athletes go on to play professionally—the now-retired jocks have to adjust to an alien way of life, one that doesn’t revolve around workouts and competition.

Sports injuries are especially difficult for college athletes. Katie McCafferty, who ran cross country and track for Georgetown, remembers the homesickness and exhaustion she felt in transitioning from high school to Division I athletics. But hardest for her was the psychological fallout from a stress fracture she suffered after competing at the Big East Cross Country Championship in October of her sophomore year. “It was the first time I had ever experienced a true injury such as a stress fracture that really kept me out of the sport for such a long time,” she wrote in an email. The pain of losing her identity as a runner, even temporarily, on top of the isolation from her teammates, who continued to go out for runs while she pedaled on gym equipment, undermined her confidence and well-being. “The psychological impact of injuries is greatly underappreciated,” Timothy Neal, Assistant Athletic Director for Sports Medicine at Syracuse, told me. “It’s a lot deeper and more concerning than people realize.”