Physical recovery is only part of the story. Addressing mental and behavioral health is essential to truly supporting patient outcomes. In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, this webinar explores how ATu’s Mental Health & Rehabilitation app and corresponding simulations help faculty prepare students to care for the whole patient. As a quick reference guide, and through interactive learning and patient-based scenarios, these tools support the development of communication skills, clinical awareness, and confidence when addressing behavioral health considerations in rehabilitation. Join us to discover practical ways to integrate the Mental Health app into your teaching, helping students better recognize, respond to, and support the psychological aspects of injury and recovery.

Featured Speaker: Christopher Schmidt, PhD, ATC

An athletic training professional for 30 years, Dr. Schmidt’s career spans clinical care, academic leadership, and professional service. From treating patients across diverse settings to shaping undergraduate and graduate programs, he’s a contributor in the field, influencing best practices through research and committee roles with the NATA and CAATE. His passion extends to curriculum design, interprofessional education, and youth sports injury prevention, helping to shape the future of athletic training. 

00:00 Mental Health Webinar Intro & Welcome

02:32 Teaching Mental Health: Common Challenges and Are Our Students Prepared…?

06:53 Special Thanks to App Authors

07:52 Integrating the Mental Health & Rehabilitation App

11:18 Mental Health App Learning Categories, App Information, & Curricular Standards

14:30 App Demo: Anxiety Disorders, Panic Disorder Example

25:00 Mental Health & Rehabilitation Simulations: Best Practices to Integrate into Your Course

28:50 Anxiety Simulation Demo

35:28 New Product Launch Announcement, Next ATu Webinar Details, & Closing

Helpful Links: Complimentary Educator access | Educator resources | Set up a Demo

Beyond the Silo: How We’re Helping Athletic Training Educators Normalize Mental Health Content Across the Curriculum

For years, mental health education in athletic training programs has lived in a kind of professional limbo—important enough to warrant inclusion, but often confined to a single course, a standalone unit, or worse, treated as supplementary content that gets squeezed in when time permits. We’ve heard this story countless times from educators: one course in the curriculum, limited clinical exposure, and then students graduate and enter practice with minimal confidence in recognizing or responding to the psychological dimensions of injury and recovery.

As we reflect on Mental Health Awareness Month and our ongoing commitment to supporting athletic training education, we wanted to pull back the curtain on a resource we’ve built specifically to address this challenge: the Mental Health and Rehabilitation app in ATu, along with its companion simulation suite. In a recent faculty webinar led by our Education Lead, Dr. Christopher Schmidt, we explored practical strategies for integrating these tools across the curriculum—not as an afterthought, but as a natural, normalized component of athletic training education that sits alongside orthopedics, therapeutic interventions, and emergency care.

The Integration Challenge

The obstacles facing mental health education in athletic training aren’t new, but they’re persistent. Faculty expertise varies widely. Some programs have robust partnerships with behavioral health professionals; others struggle to find qualified guest lecturers. Students arrive with different levels of prior exposure and varying degrees of comfort discussing mental health. And perhaps most critically, the traditional curricular structure often segregates this content into a single course, limiting opportunities for repeated exposure, clinical reasoning development, and meaningful integration with other foundational competencies.

During the webinar, Dr. Schmidt candidly shared his own teaching evolution. “When the NATA adopted the ICF model as the disablement model for our profession, that was really the impetus for me to begin teaching from a biopsychosocial, spiritual approach,” he explained. But even with that intentional shift, he recognized something was missing. Teaching mental health considerations in isolation—even when thoughtfully done—can feel artificial and clinical. The real challenge is weaving this content throughout the learning experience so students develop the instinct to consider psychological factors as naturally as they assess range of motion or palpate for point tenderness.

Placement Matters: Mental Health as a Core Resource

One of the most elegant solutions we’ve implemented is deceptively simple: placement. In ATu, the Mental Health and Rehabilitation app sits right alongside Physical Agents, Orthopaedics, Gait Analysis, and Emergency Care. It’s not tucked away in a separate platform or reserved for a specific course. From day one of a program, students see mental health content presented as equally important and equally accessible as any other foundational area.

This matters more than you might initially think. When mental health resources are siloed—geographically separated in a learning management system or temporally confined to a single semester—it sends an implicit message about their relative importance. But when students log into ATu and see Mental Health and Rehabilitation as a peer to the “standard” apps they’ll use throughout their education, it normalizes the content. It signals that understanding panic disorder is as fundamental to competent practice as understanding ankle sprains. And it makes those resources available whenever they’re needed, not just during a designated unit.

We recommend that programs using ATu take advantage of this during student onboarding. Spend time during orientation demonstrating the platform, highlighting which apps and simulations you’ll use across different courses, and specifically calling out the mental health resources. Make it clear that these tools will be referenced not just in one class, but throughout their education—in orthopedic assessment case studies, therapeutic interventions planning, pharmacology discussions, and clinical reasoning exercises.

Cross-Curricular Integration in Practice

The Mental Health and Rehabilitation app is structured to make cross-curricular integration straightforward. Each condition—whether it’s generalized anxiety disorder, depression, or trauma-related disorders—includes five consistent subcategories: diagnostic criteria, prevalence, functional consequences, applications in rehabilitation, and medications.

These subcategories map naturally onto existing courses across a typical athletic training curriculum. Take diagnostic criteria, for example. Drawn from the DSM-5, these sections provide the clinical characteristics and symptoms that define each condition. In an orthopedic assessment course, these become powerful tools for expanding patient case studies beyond purely musculoskeletal presentations. What if that patient complaining of wrist pain following a fracture also presents with sweating, trembling, chest discomfort, and fear of losing control? Students trained to view these symptoms only through a cardiovascular lens might miss the possibility of panic disorder. By intentionally embedding mental health signs and symptoms into subjective assessments, standardized patient encounters, and OSCEs, educators can help students remove the blinders and practice whole-person evaluation.

Prevalence data serves a similar cross-curricular function. Understanding epidemiology is a cornerstone of evidence-based practice, yet we often limit these discussions to injury rates and musculoskeletal conditions. The prevalence sections in the Mental Health app provide the same type of data for behavioral health conditions—overall population prevalence, demographic variations, and age-related patterns. This content fits naturally into research methods courses, evidence-based practice units, or anywhere epidemiology is discussed. It reinforces that understanding who is at risk for panic disorder or major depressive disorder is just as relevant to clinical decision-making as knowing ACL injury rates in female athletes.

The functional consequences sections offer particularly rich material for therapeutic interventions and rehabilitation courses. These brief, focused descriptions outline how a given condition affects daily function—increased healthcare utilization, poor quality of life, difficulty maintaining employment, or impaired social relationships. Since athletic trainers are fundamentally concerned with restoring function, these sections create natural connections between mental health conditions and rehabilitation planning. How might depression affect a patient’s adherence to a therapeutic exercise program? What accommodations might be necessary when working with someone experiencing anxiety symptoms? These questions belong in every rehab course, not just a standalone mental health class.

Screening Tools and Therapeutic Techniques

Two additional features of the app deserve special attention: the integrated screening tools and therapeutic techniques. The screening tools section provides direct access to validated instruments like the Beck Anxiety Inventory, complete with psychometric information and downloadable PDFs. These aren’t buried in external links or reserved for advanced coursework—they’re immediately available as patient-reported outcome measures that students can explore, practice with, and eventually use in clinical settings. 

This creates an opportunity to normalize mental health screening as part of standard intake procedures. Just as students learn to administer functional movement screens or joint-specific questionnaires, they can learn to incorporate brief mental health screening into their subjective examinations. The tools are evidence-based, freely accessible within the platform, and presented in the same format as other clinical assessment resources. This makes it easy for faculty to say, “Here’s how we assess ankle function, and here’s how we screen for anxiety symptoms”—presenting both as routine components of comprehensive patient care.

The therapeutic techniques section offers a curated list of approaches applicable to each condition, from expressing empathy to cognitive restructuring strategies. These aren’t prescriptive protocols that exceed athletic training scope of practice; rather, they’re evidence-informed communication and supportive techniques that any healthcare provider can use. For students in therapeutic interventions courses who are learning about cryotherapy, electrotherapy, and manual techniques, this provides a parallel framework: there are also therapeutic approaches for supporting patients experiencing mental health challenges. Some techniques, like expressing empathy or motivational interviewing, have applications far beyond mental health and represent core clinical skills worth developing regardless of the presenting condition.

Bringing It to Life Through Simulation

Knowledge without application remains theoretical, and this is where clinical education traditionally struggles with mental health content. How often do students encounter patients with diagnosed anxiety or depression during their clinical rotations? How many opportunities do they have to practice recognizing subtle psychological symptoms or navigating difficult conversations about mental health? For most students, these experiences are rare at best.

The Mental Health and Rehabilitation Simulations app addresses this gap through four macro-level simulations—interactive, immersive scenarios that allow students to practice recognizing and responding to anxiety and depression symptoms in rehabilitation contexts. These aren’t quick knowledge checks; they’re hour-long experiences that blend information delivery, clinical decision-making, and immediate formative feedback.

During the webinar demonstration, Dr. Schmidt walked through “Managing Individuals with Anxiety Symptoms Part 1,” which follows Tom, a 58-year-old male referred to rehabilitation following a wrist fracture. The simulation includes video vignettes showing therapist-patient interactions, both effective and ineffective. Students hear Tom describe his anxiety about recovery, see his completed Beck Anxiety Inventory, interpret the score, and then evaluate different communication approaches. They’re asked to identify contributing factors to his anxiety, select appropriate therapeutic techniques, and recognize when responses might inadvertently invalidate or dismiss patient concerns.

What makes these simulations particularly valuable is the blend of support and challenge. Students receive informational content and context throughout, with hyperlinks back to relevant app sections when they need to review diagnostic criteria or treatment approaches. The questions require genuine clinical reasoning—selecting all factors contributing to anxiety, comparing communication strategies, interpreting screening tool results—but students aren’t left stranded. Immediate feedback explains why answers are correct or incorrect, and there’s always the option to review and reflect on performance at the end.

From Content to Competence

Perhaps the most important insight from the webinar came during Dr. Schmidt’s discussion of retention and competence. When mental health content appears in only one course during one semester, students have limited opportunities to build and maintain proficiency. They might learn to recognize symptoms and understand treatment options in the moment, but without repeated exposure and application across contexts, that knowledge fades. As he put it, invoking the familiar adage: “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

This is the fundamental argument for cross-curricular integration. By embedding mental health content throughout the curriculum—in assessment courses, intervention classes, pharmacology units, evidence-based practice discussions, and simulated clinical experiences—we create multiple touchpoints that reinforce learning and build genuine competence. Students don’t just memorize diagnostic criteria for an exam; they apply that knowledge in case studies, encounter it in simulations, connect it to medication discussions, and eventually integrate it into their clinical reasoning process.

The tools we’ve built are designed to support this kind of distributed, integrated approach. The app provides quick-reference content that’s always accessible, whether students are in a first-year assessment lab or a final-year clinical practicum. The simulations offer realistic practice opportunities that can be deployed at strategic points across the curriculum—perhaps introducing the anxiety simulations during a therapeutic interventions course and the depression simulations during an evidence-based practice class. And because everything is housed within ATu, there’s no need to toggle between platforms, manage separate logins, or treat mental health resources as fundamentally different from other clinical content.

Moving Forward

We built these resources because we kept hearing the same challenges from athletic training educators: variable expertise, limited clinical exposure, siloed content, and students who graduate with knowledge but insufficient confidence to address mental health concerns in practice. We believe the solution isn’t just more content—it’s smarter integration, better tools, and a fundamental shift in how we position mental health education within athletic training curricula.

By placing mental health resources alongside orthopedics and emergency care, we normalize them. By structuring content to map naturally onto existing courses, we enable cross-curricular integration. By providing interactive simulations, we create practice opportunities that clinical education often can’t. And by making everything immediately accessible throughout a student’s education, we support the kind of repeated exposure and application that builds lasting competence.

If you’re an athletic training educator looking to strengthen mental health education in your program, we’d encourage you to think beyond the standalone course model. Consider where diagnostic criteria might enrich your assessment teaching. Look for opportunities to incorporate screening tools into your intervention labs. Use simulations as catalysts for classroom discussion and clinical reasoning practice. And perhaps most importantly, make mental health content visible and accessible from day one, sending the clear message that understanding the whole patient—physical, psychological, and social—is what competent athletic training looks like.

Because ultimately, that’s the goal: preparing graduates who instinctively recognize when an injured athlete’s irritability might signal depression, who know how to screen for anxiety in a rehabilitation setting, who understand that psychological factors affect recovery outcomes, and who are confident in their ability to provide supportive care and appropriate referrals. That’s not a skill you can build in one course. But with the right tools and intentional integration across the curriculum, it’s absolutely achievable.