The Shocking Truth Behind NFL Player Suicides: Is CTE the Real Culprit or Just the Tip of the Iceberg?

Mental health crises are rarely the consequence of a single input, even among potentially CTE-affected NFL players. It’s therefore important for players and their doctors to consider alternative explanations for CTE-like symptoms. Indeed, many of the symptoms most associated with CTE (memory loss, brain fog, aggression, depression, etc.) are also symptoms linked to other ailments like sleep apnea, low testosterone and high blood pressure. Adding to the confusion, each of these individual symptoms can also be caused or exacerbated by head injury, with or without the presence of CTE

There’s also the possibility that some of the rise may have to do with how player deaths are classified. “Deaths among NFL players that would not have been classified as suicides by medical examiners prior to 2011 may have been labeled a suicide after 2010, as a result of greater awareness of issues related to head trauma,” the study’s co-author, Marc Weisskopf, told the Daily Mail.

Perhaps most importantly, once the spectre of CTE is removed from (or, at least, appropriately framed in) the discussion, treatment options become available, even if CTE remains a real risk factor. Hall of Fame running back Tony Dorsett was diagnosed with CTE-like symptoms in 2013 (again, definitive diagnosis of CTE is only possible after death and Dorsett is still alive). The symptoms that pushed him to seek testing are familiar: memory loss, depression and suicidal thoughts. Thirteen years later, Dorsett has even become an advocate for sleep apnea treatments. Even more relevantly, recently retired tight end Hayden Hurst, who was diagnosed with a non-CTE neurological condition after an NFL concussion in 2023, has discussed experiencing (and overcoming) a suicide attempt earlier in his career.

Which is all to say when an NFL player takes his own life, multiple questions arise around the complicated relationship between professional football, mental health and suicide. Given the simultaneous surges in CTE awareness and NFL suicides over the last 15 years, a tendency to conflate the two emerges. But, according to the Harvard study, that’s not the correct way of looking at things and Weisskopf says that “more research is needed to determine the individual contributions” of factors that lead to former NFL players’ suicides.