I must be hanging around in the wrong circles.

There I’ve been for much of the past 10 years, either studying a Masters in sport psychology or practising in the field and I’ve never paid a moment’s attention to the works of a Deepak Chopra.

Prior to a column by Joe Brolly last Sunday in a supposedly reputable newspaper, the only other time I’d encountered the man’s name in an article was reading about the Kobe Bryant documentary Muse released earlier this year which was filmed by Chopra’s son, Gotham.

And yet, according to Joe, Chopra Senior is “the doyen” of “absurd self-help gurus”, Joe believing the latter group and “sport psychologists” are one and the same kind. Everyone in the field of sport psychology apparently are “all devotees” of Gotham’s dad even though Deepak himself never studied any field of psychology, sport or otherwise.

So there’s me all that time pouring through tens of academic volumes and hundreds of research papers as well as many more accessible books on the discipline, not to mention all those conversations with other colleagues in the field and I didn’t even know of our supposed leader. Like a Muslim in Mecca not knowing the whole lark has been about a guy called Mohammed.

There’s more. A couple of times now in recent weeks Joe has suggested that sport psychologists are cleaning up financially in the sphere of the GAA.

For three consecutive years I worked exhaustively with teams that made it to either the last or penultimate game of the football championship yet in none of those seasons would the costing have run into five figures. It’d certainly have been less than Joe would command for a handful of appearances on The Sunday Game.

This past season another qualified colleague and friend who significantly contributed to a county having one of the best season’s in the country and one of the most successful in their entire history charged only mileage for the service. Clearly, for all our good work, we’re messing up and missing out on all this money Joe seems to think all these other supposed devotees of Deepak’s are raking in.

For all that, Joe’s piece for the most part left me unperturbed (Maybe I’m Zen by nature). Much of it amused me. Not just for those aforementioned couple of outrageous and inaccurate claims, but for how he made a valid point. There is a lot of bullshit touted out there. By cash-in opportunists and spoofers and supposed self-help gurus and some charlatans that will be described either by themselves or others as sport psychologists.

Even some very fine and promising and qualified sport psychologists are a little too prone to use highfalutin quotes, be it an overly-complex academic concept, or at the other end of the scale, a fluffy dog-in-motivational-poster line, which Joe, as he so wonderfully can, absolutely extracted the urine from. “Go first-class all the way and the universe will respond by giving you the best,” Deepak apparently has spouted. Mmm. I don’t think he’ll ever get the benefit of this column being one of his devotees.

But the reason we decided not to just laugh Joe’s column off as just Joe being Joe and a “bit of craic” is because it wasn’t harmless. An injustice was done, on several counts.

The most obvious and appalling was the personal and professional attack on Enda McNulty. In certain sport psychology circles, there are folk who would have been delighted to see the former Armagh player knocked off his perch just as much as they would have been seething that Brolly had tarred the whole discipline with the one brush. There is considerable jealousy, professional or otherwise, of McNulty.

I personally have a lot of admiration and respect for the man. Sure there has been occasion where a line of his may have been too corporate. But the record shows that he is a very pragmatic and effective practitioner that has made a profound and positive impact upon some of this country’s greatest sportspeople.

Just last year alone two leading sports autobiographies detailed how McNulty helped them in 2009. That June Paul Galvin was feeling pissed off and burned out. Against Cork he’d been sent off. Again. After a discussion with McNulty, he realised his pre-match preparation was too intense. He had no way of switching off from football. No strategy, no routine.

After an intervention with McNulty, he learned to be more laid back. To have more interests. The approach worked for him. Later that same season he was Footballer of the Year.

A little earlier that season Brian O’Driscoll’s confidence was at the lowest point of his career. Thanks to a well-documented, detailed intervention of McNulty’s, O’Driscoll would finish that year as a Grand Slam and Heineken Cup winner and a nominee for world player of the year.

The spoofers Joe refers to might bluff their way into a dressing room for a night but they won’t be asked back for a second one, let alone a second season. McNulty was part of the Leinster staff for five seasons in which time they would win three Heineken Cups. Since joining Ireland they’ve won two Six Nations championships. You’d hardly survive if Brian O’Driscoll or Paul O’Connell or Joe Schmidt thought you were a bullshitter.

There was another unfortunate downside to Joe’s piece. In disparaging a whole discipline that he is about as familiar with as I am with the work of Deepak Chopra, Joe would have frightened off more than one coach or player suffering with confidence issues that would otherwise have contacted a sport psychologist that could help.

Recently a well-known player who has won multiple national titles spoke to a number of sport psychologists including me about how his career had been transformed – saved – by one of our colleagues. He could have disappeared without a trace, never to be known by Joe Brolly or anyone else. He didn’t think he belonged at the intercounty level. He continuously doubted himself and beat himself up. Whenever he did play well or made a good play, he discounted it as a fluke, meaning he was never giving himself or his confidence a proper chance. Until he met a sport psychologist. He’s hardly looked back since.

That’s why I wrote this article rather than just laugh with or at Joe. Because out there there are athletes suffering in silence just like that player once was who’d be much better off listening to an Enda McNulty than a Joe.