“Back in the Game”: A Concussion Book That Stands Out In Crowded Field
Subsequent chapters discuss post-concussion syndrome and second-impact, an excellent discussion of the links between concussion, sports, depression (with a particularly useful section on the three different kinds of depression and how to keep them straight when all three are present at the same time) and suicide. I found particularly informative their discussion of how suicide rates in general, and among former National Football League players in particular, can be and have been affected by messaging in the media – a phenomenon called the “suicide contagion” – and how, unfortunately, the media, in its coverage of the suicide of players such as Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, has consistently ignored all seven of the recommendations of the Centers of Disease Control on how to avoid spreading that contagion, including not presenting simplistic explanations for suicide, not engaging in repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide in the news, and not providing sensational coverage of suicide.
While some of this information is new (particularly the sections on depression and suicide), much of it covers ground that has been plowed many times before in other books and websites such as MomsTEAM (and our new SmartTeams concussion site on which you reading this post). Yet Kutcher and Gerstner somehow manage to come up with ways to convey the information in fresh new ways and easy to understand terms.
Chapter Seven, entitled “How Athletes Can Help Themselves,” returns to a theme introduced at the very beginning of the book – that our sports culture teaches athletes, particularly at the elite level, to play through pain and play with concussion, with sometimes dire consequences – and the need for athletes, parents, and coaches to recognize that athletes are “not destructible, they can get concussed, and they need to be honest when they are hurt,” or as the authors advises athletes: “Say something. To Somebody. Please.”
As with many concussion books, the authors use the stories of former elite athletes, in this case, two-time Olympic gold medalist and World Cup-winning soccer player Kate (nee Sobrero) Markgraf and pioneering X-Games snowboarder Ellery Hollingsworth, to personalize the message that “if an athlete is hurt, if they do not feel right, if they know something is wrong in their gut … they should ultimately feel empowered to say something. Giving answers they think their coaches, teammates, or family want to hear doesn’t help anybody in the end.” The challenge that they, like I, have long recognized is to actually get an athlete of any age to actually think that way.
As MomsTEAM and I have always done, Kutcher and Gerstner stress the need for athletes to become educated about concussions, to be leery of television productions, movies, or other media that have been produced for shock value, to ask themselves about the motivation that person has in getting their message out, to question their sources of information, and to rely on trusted resources for their concussion information (it was an honor for MomsTEAM to be included among those resources in the book’s appendix).
