This week is mental illness awareness week, a time to educate and increase awareness.

As the director of sports performance at the University of Pennsylvania, Andrea Wieland knows mental health is crucial to athletes and says for anyone, it’s a huge part of being a whole person.

“We see impacts on sleep and for athletes, its going to impact their movement, memory, moods, how they’re recovering,” Weiland said. “So sleep can be affected when mental health is not going well. Sometimes people socially isolate or they become more active. They just don’t feel like themselves.”

Andrea says we want to address concerns as early as possible. At Penn, they have training to show athletes the difference between stress, distress and crisis. Stress, being normal life situations that don’t need intervention, distress meaning a prolonged, lingering feeling and crisis, where treatment is required — situations where someone may be a threat to their own safety or someone else’s.