Here’s the thing
1) Tkachuk needs to get suspended for this hit b/c head injuries are serious
2) Kassian needs to get suspended for what he did b/c head injuries are serious
3) I have little faith the NHL will do both b/c ultimately the NHL doesn’t really care about player safety https://twitter.com/ZainL96/status/1216236392205864961

(I think they’ll suspend Kassian but not Tkachuk is what I mean.)

As we learn more about head injuries and CTE, the link to a number of areas (cognitive decline, mental health, potentially even suicide) become stronger.

So sometimes as we watch these hits, I can’t help but wonder: are we watching the beginnings of another suicide?

Those who follow me know my day job is mental health treatment. Basically all I think about outside of hockey & my family is my day job: which maybe 25-50% children thinking of killing themselves.

So I think about the topic of suicide a lot.

What we know is suicide isn’t a ‘one triggering event’ thing. It’s the culmination of a variety of factors. Some are more distant (childhood trauma, abuse for example), some are more acute (maybe just had a major loss, or currently intoxicated).

Some we call ‘modifiable risk factors’ in that you can do something about them. Teach coping skills, treat depression, stop alcohol use. They may not be modifiable in the short term, but you can conceivably bring that risk back to baseline.

Some are ‘unmodifiable risk factors’. They can’t be changed. e.g. If you’ve attempted suicide before, you have a greater risk of doing it again. You can’t erase the past. You can treat the factors that lead to the 1st one, but your risk is never the same as if you never attempted

So all these factors add up when assessing a suicide attempt. Maybe 10% is from this, 15% from that. 20% what happened yesterday, 40% what happened 20 years ago. All of it adding not to an absolute prediction, but to a level of risk.

Here’s what I’m getting at with all this. If indeed CTE & head injuries increase your risk of suicide, that’s an unmodifiable risk factor.

No treatment, no drug, no therapy will ever completely fix your brain. Your risk of suicide will ‘always’ be higher. No matter what.

So sometimes I watch these games & I can’t entirely turn off my day job (which is half the reason I watch these games).

I can’t help wonder, with every head shot, did I just see a guy increase his risk of suicide by 0.1%? Are we, in some weird way, just watching men slowly die?

And if so, how far does that culpability spread? The guy that gave the headshot of course. But also the league for allowing it. The culture that ingrained it. The fans for cheering for it? Me? What, even microscopic, role do I play in all this?

Whenever there’s a suicide, by definition one person did the act. when you dig in, though, a lot of factors, events, and people all got together to pull the trigger, often unwittingly. Some things pulled it more, some just edged it on maybe 0.0001% further.

When Wade Belak (and others) died, he pulled the proverbial trigger but who else helped him? And how many of those factors, even small ones, would’ve swung the needle just far enough over to ‘not suicide’ that he’d be alone today.

Will anyone we watched tonight be in that boat?

*alive today, of course

Anyways, this is a meandering thread that has lost its way from saying the NHL needs to suspend these plays.

But often I’ll be watching hockey & then immediately go into the hospital & assess a kid who tried to kill himself & just got concussed 2 weeks ago. So it’s on my mind.

I don’t an answer to all of it, or the right way to proceed, or the balance to strike between the role of sports and fandom in society. It’s just what goes through my head a lot as we watch and discuss the aftermath of these posts.

TLDR: Suspend Tkachuk, suspend Kassian, take this stuff seriously.

Or conversely, if you don’t care at all, that’s fine. You do you. But it may worth reflecting on the cognitive dissonance required to then tweet on Bell Let’s Talk day, for example.