Why it’s a problem: A new Harvard study and a recent article in The Guardian rightly caution against reflexively attributing all NFL suicides to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). However, the caution stems from a rather ambiguous finding from the Harvard researchers, that the rate of suicides in the NFL (a sport with high risk of head trauma) was on par with MLB and the NBA (which are limited-contact sports) up until 2010, when the rate of suicides in the NFL more than doubled. This finding leads both The Guardian and the Harvard researchers to conclude that other factors might be involved in the increased rate of NFL suicides.

Again, it’s very reasonable to caution against attributing all NFL suicides to a single factor, which would be reductive. A 2023 study by Boston University found that a startling 92% of deceased NFL football players whose brains were autopsied had CTE. Meanwhile, less than 1% of the general population is found to have CTE. In other words, we can easily conclude that almost all football players who die by suicide probably have CTE, while the vast majority of people in the general population who die by suicide probably don’t have CTE. From these statistics, however, we would be gravely mistaken to conclude that CTE leads to suicide. As I’ve discussed before, this kind of reasoning is a dangerous logical fallacy.

The fact is that most NFL players do have CTE, but the vast majority of players with CTE are not dying by suicide. (The Harvard researchers suggest that the rate of suicide in NFL and former NFL players is about 0.3%.) We should still be very concerned about the elevated risk of suicide among NFL players, and particularly attuned to these athletes’ mental health, given the alarming rates of CTE. It’s one reason why I feel it’s immoral to watch football. (To paraphrase Billie Eilish, you can’t claim to care about mental health while also supporting an industry that destroys people’s mental health.)

As the Harvard researchers do well to note, there are certainly many factors other than CTE contributing to players’ suicides for the simple fact that football players are humans, and all humans are vulnerable to suicide. What I find less convincing, however, are the alternative explanations offered by the researchers for the higher risk of suicide found in football players since 2010, including increased awareness about CTE and possible suicide contagion.

Although improved helmets, for example, may reduce the impacts from concussion, NFL players have become larger in recent decades (likely due to steroids, but also improved “nutrition”), which makes the risk of concussion from player contact more severe. Also, we shouldn’t forget about the NFL bounty scandal that was exposed in 2012. The increased violence in an already violent sport may have increased the severity of concussions for athletes playing in the years leading up to 2010, the impacts of which would start to show in the last decade, precisely the time when the rates of suicides have increased.

There are therefore numerous developments internal to the NFL that may have increased the risk of concussion in recent decades, and these factors need to be considered for their potential role in the increased rate of suicide in the NFL since 2010. My concern is that the article in The Guardian and the Harvard paper both seem to bend over backwards to help the NFL evade accountability.

It also leaves me wondering, where was this same caution from researchers during the past decade when the media was linking every crime and mass shooting to mental illness? While it’s important not to reductively attribute every NFL suicide to CTE, the evidence for the presence of CTE in NFL players is clear-cut. (Again, the mere presence of CTE does NOT mean that it played a role in the athlete’s suicide.) On the other hand, the presence, let alone the presumed role of mental health, in violent crime is almost always conjectural and based on circumstantial evidence or hearsay from law enforcement, family members, and acquaintances. (And again, the mere presence of mental health issues, including a formal diagnosis, should NOT be used to infer that mental health issues caused the person to commit a crime.) However, the caution from researchers attributing violence to single factors has been largely absent when less privileged people’s (especially poor, BIPOC people’s) lives have been impacted. More precisely, when a multibillion-dollar institution is at stake, it’s not surprising to see media and researchers equivocating in its defense.

Source: The Guardian