‘Brain Damaged’ is a collection of firsthand accounts of the lives and deaths athletes—youth, collegiate, or pro—who were lost due to CTE or other brain damage. Told with fierce love, these stories are deeply important, because the changes they should inspire have the capacity to ensure that future athletes and their families won’t suffer the same tragic fate. — Mike Kasdan
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Review by Jennifer Fraser, PhD.
What will it take before we protect children from a game designed by adults, a game that makes many adults a lot of money, a game that is seen as traditional and unchangeable, but becomes more and more dangerous to children due to technological innovation?
Will it take the death of Paul Bright Jr. and others who behave in irrational and reckless ways, dying in road accidents? Will it take the lawsuits piling up by NFL and NHL players whose brains are wrecked? Will it take the suicide of Tyler Hilinski, promising quarter back at Washington State, who blew his brain away in January 2018?
What links all of these tragedies is Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), all confirmed by autopsies.
How do you get this condition?
Repeat blows to the head starting when you’re a child, starting when your helmet’s not designed or tested for your head or what weight your neck can bear. It starts when your brain sloshes around like a raw egg getting damaged with every crack on the interior of your skull. It starts when you get a concussion and the adults in your world don’t even realize it or its severity and put you back into play too soon, or that you return to play at the right time, but considering the game you’re playing, it happens again and again and again. And even when you stop at around 14 or 15 knowing there’s something wrong, by then it’s too late.
By then, your brain shows signs of damage. You can’t sleep; you suffer from a lack of impulse control; you can’t remember things; you have poor judgement and so many headaches. These are early signs of what is now eating away at your brain getting worse with time until you may well die prematurely in an accident or by your own hand.
Why aren’t we doing anything to stop this terrible cycle? Is it because we didn’t know??
Kimberly Archie, known in the NFL as the “Mother of Youth Sport Safety,” says the cover up of the relationship between contact sport and brain damage started in 1969 and it’s been going strong ever since. Archie, whose own son died from CTE, has become a “warrior for justice.” She did paralegal training to become the engineer of Civil Rights for Children in Sport. Kimberly Archie is one of those rare individuals that experts in heroism, like psychologists Piero Bocchiaro and Zeno Franco, refer to as “social heroes.”
Brain Damaged is a collection of true stories where an “Erin Brockovich” collaborates with parents who’ve lost children to the brutality and corruption of the Hunger Games. Kimberly Archie is not fighting like Brokovich to stop the contamination of a town’s water. She’s fighting to save kids’ lives, kids who are being sacrificed to sports.
Is Hunger Games an exaggeration?
In the Hunger Games’s fictional “Capital,” children are put into an arena and fight to the death. The one that wins is given riches, rewards and a lot of media attention. In football, hockey and boxing, or even heading the ball in soccer, the only difference is children don’t actively kill one another. It is the game that has the force to kill them. The repeat blows to the brain are known to result in CTE which like cancer turns a child against themselves so that they do the dirty work. No adults have blood on their hands when a child crashes their motorcycle or takes a gun to their head. It’s a perfect crime and utterly condoned in society so that if you even dare to point it out, you will have a lot of criticism, cruelty and anger sent your way. Ask Kimberly Archie.
Kimberly Archie first began advocating and then actively fighting for child rights when her daughter suffered a serious break to her arm in cheer-leading practice. After surgery, when Archie went to her insurance company, they told her they would not cover the $10,000 in bills because it was a case of “child maltreatment due to improper supervision.”
What kind of supervision do we offer in contact sports? The coach is there. The parents are there. It’s just that the adults have carefully affixed blinders so that they only see what they want. They cannot see within the skull where the poison of CTE is slowly seeping. They just see the game.
We live in the 21st century where we’ve made a change from the traditional typewriter to the computer. We’ve made the shift from driving our kids without seatbelts on to ensuring that they are buckled up and even in car seats until the authorities and experts say it’s safe. We have made the leap from believing that smoking is cool and glamourous to recognizing it causes cancer. Surely we can make some changes to sports that protect children’s brains. Surely we can put in some new rules that keep the love of the game alive and well while at the same time stopping the direct correlation between certain sports and brain damage.
And if we can’t change the game, then we shouldn’t encourage children to play it. We need laws that only allow someone to play when they are an adult who can make an informed consent and fully understand the risks to their brains and hence their lives. I mean if a child is raised in a cult and told after years of indoctrination to drink the koolaid or marry someone who is an old man when they are barely 13, we would be appalled at the injustice. Some sports have become normalized cults and it’s time to admit that.
Promising Washington State quarter back, Tyler Hilinski’s brain when autopsied looked like the brain of a 65 year old. He shot himself at the age of 21. Does that sound normal, healthy, or just to you?
Brain Damaged needs to be read by every politician, every parent, every coach, every person who believes the lie that sports are “safer than ever.” It is a choice to listen to the cover up, the propaganda, the white lies and equivocation churned out by those who personally benefit from youth sports, or to listen to the 8000 hours of research done by Kimberly Archie who is fighting to put “brains before games.” Listen to the heart-breaking stories of many families who have lost a loved one to CTE and who are now joining forces to ensure other children aren’t sacrificed to a rigid system that privileges a game and knowingly sacrifices children to it.
Click here to buy the ‘Brain Damaged’
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About the Author of this Review
Jennifer Fraser, PhD advocates for child safety in sport and beyond. Since the publication of her book 1n 2015, Teaching Bullies, she has researched sport psychology and neuroscience in order to expose the lie that abusive coaching is good for athletes and secures wins. Just recently she completed 8 online courses to help organizations tackle abuse and bullying in an innovative and brain-aware way. Check out https://endbullying.