The Shocking Truth Behind NFL Player Suicides: Is CTE the Real Culprit or Just the Tip of the Iceberg?
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The findings were published in January by members of Harvard’s ongoing Football Player Health Study (FPHS), a diverse group of neuroscientists, former NFL players and others who have been examining the health and wellbeing of professional football players since 2014.
“As someone raised in a basketball family, I came into this research with a lot of assumptions,” Dr Rachel Grashow, one of the FPHS study’s lead authors, tells the Guardian. “I learned pretty quickly that the public narrative around CTE didn’t actually reflect the scientific nuance and the lived experience of many players.”
The group’s researchers used the National Death Index to gather cause-of-death information for about 34,000 NFL, NBA and MLB players over a 40-year period between 1979 and 2019. When examined across all four decades, NFL players were found to be 20% more likely than their basketball- and baseball-playing colleagues to die by suicide. This may be about what the average fan would expect when comparing football to less contact-intensive sports. Viewing the data in a more meticulous manner, however, reveals a more upsetting, but ultimately actionable, truth.
If the analysis is limited to the period from 1979 to 2009, NFL players were roughly 10% less likely than their NBA and MLB counterparts to die by suicide. It’s only since 2009 that NFL players have become more likely to take their own lives in relation to their peers, and the change has been significant. In the 10-year period from 2009-2019, NFL players became 260% more likely than NBA and MLB players to die by suicide. It’s a staggering change which raises a question – what could explain such a swing?
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