After every mass shooting there is a furtive quest to discover why the shooter would do something so horrible to other fellow human beings. It is hard to imagine why someone could take a life, let alone multiple lives. Most news outlets focus on the shooter’s recent history, tirades on social media, or work or family problems to define the mental state of the shooter. Very seldom, if ever, do law enforcement authorities, reporters or healthcare professionals mention the shooter’s brain.
We firmly believe that needs to change.
It is the brain that may hold clues to why a mass murderer turned a gun on innocent people, and then, often, himself. A brain autopsy could help us understand what went so terribly wrong. At the very least it could provide an opportunity to discuss brain health, the shooter’s health history, and perhaps even save lives.
Connor Sturgeon’s father asked the medical examiner to look at his son’s brain, after he killed five people in a Louisville bank. This should be an automatic procedure in shooting cases. Someone with a healthy brain does not walk into a bank and kill coworkers. Someone who has suffered damage from youth football just might. The Kentucky shooter had a history of concussions from football.
Brains are very delicate organs and control all human behavior. Brains take decades to fully form and that process is crucial to the development of one’s personality, behavior and emotional health. If somehow this vital organ becomes damaged or its growth and development is altered, changes in all aspects of one’s life are also transformed.
We watched a bright, beautiful mind change after years of playing high school and college football. Our son had an amazing future after graduating from Dartmouth but we watched in agony as he started struggling with work and relationships. We started to see a lack of empathy for others, paranoia, and even schizophrenic behavior. He could hold it together for short periods around his many friends, an ability called “showing,” but long term he was broken. He had uncontrollable fits of anger and profound confusion. His interpretation of discussions and plans were always mistaken. His life was constant conflict and difficulty and his forgetfulness and irrationality just made everything worse. He lost sleep for days at a time and he admitted to having terrible thoughts.
We lost our dear son to suicide. But brain damage from football is what really stole our child. His brain autopsy showed CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
A history of brain trauma and trouble with the law is fairly well-documented. The CDC found 87 percent of inmates reported suffering brain trauma, compared to 8.5 percent of the general population. And this study did not include repeated head trauma from contact sports. Another study of female inmates found that 84 percent received repetitive head trauma from domestic abuse.
We are not saying that every person who played a contact sport, or served in the military, or suffered from abuse will develop CTE, any more than we can say smoking will always cause lung cancer. However, studies on the correlation suggest it is certainly a factor to be considered.
That is all we are asking. Please, for the sake of our youth and the mental health of our nation, let’s start looking at brain trauma history when we are faced with abhorrent behaviors and incidents. Sadly, youth boxing, football, soccer, hockey and so many other pastimes are little brain trauma factories. We can’t continually subject young developing brains to physical abuse and then wonder decades later what happened to that person.
We know that is our first thought, but why is it never even considered by news media and mental health experts? While we are, admittedly, very close to the issue, failure to look at it at all is inexcusable and dangerous. Failure to see the damage we are doing to society by ignoring the health of young brains allows this tragic problem to continue.
Our son came into our life as a blessing and left as an inspiration and a lesson: to stop CTE. However, it won’t stop if we refuse to look for it.
Karen and Doug Zegel, of Doylestown, are co-founders of the Patrick Risha CTE Awareness Foundation, StopCTE.org.
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