Grim toll of brain injuries
How much suffering will it take before we learn, and act?
On Wednesday, BU researchers released their analysis of the brain of Robert R. Card II, who murdered 18 people in a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, in October. The Army Reservist, who killed himself after his rampage, had profound brain damage — scarring, inflammation, missing white matter — likely the result of thousands of grenade blasts he endured as a weapons instructor.
They said the brain injuries likely played a role in the terrifying behavioral changes his friends and family noticed in the months before Card killed and injured so many: Card, 40, was paranoid and delusional, threatening and lashing out at people.
Catastrophic brain damage keeps showing up in those whose jobs involve head trauma — in military personnel and football players and other athletes who suffer repeated, even sub-concussive, head impacts. And too often, it has had horrific consequences.
Patriots star Aaron Hernandez, who murdered one man, was accused and acquitted of murdering two others, and who killed himself in prison, had devastating brain damage. As did former NFL player Phillip Adams, who killed six people and himself in South Carolina in 2021. Degenerative brain disease has been found in several former players who killed themselves and others, and in hundreds of other former players.
Despite the fact that every game carries the risk of injury, death, or tragedy now or years down the line, millions of us still love football, and that’s just how the massively profitable NFL likes it. Despite the research showing that young brains are even more vulnerable to these injuries, parents still sign their kids up to play.
At least professional football players are well paid for the risks they take. Not so those who sign up for the military, who also suffer traumatic brain injuries constantly, with little protection, and even less support.
Shortly after the Lewiston shootings, a New York Times investigation laid it all out. It centered on Marines sent to Syria and
Iraq to bombard the Islamic State with repeated artillery blasts in 2016 and 2017. Many returned home with disturbing psychological symptoms, even though they were miles from front lines: nightmares, hallucinations, panic attacks, and depression. An alarming number committed suicide, or attempted it.
Too often, the former gun crew members were treated for psychiatric disorders instead of brain injuries; some were viewed as problems, forced out of the service and made ineligible for veterans’ health care.
The Times also reported that the Army had clear signs that grenade blasts were harming soldiers long before Card’s rampage, investigating practice ranges in 2015 and 2017 after receiving complaints from instructors that the blasts were giving them headaches, memory problems, and confusion.
But the investigations never went very far. After the Times revelations, the military announced a plan to give cognitive tests to troops every five years. And though leadership has begun to take blast injuries more seriously, troops told the Times that changes have so far failed to filter down to them.
As in the NFL, a measure of denial about traumatic brain injury is necessary to keep the enterprise running. And too few of us take those injuries seriously enough to demand otherwise.
“We are normalized into disbelieving the gravity of these injuries,” said Stephen Casper, a historian of medicine at Clarkson University in New York, who is writing a cultural history of concussions. “People are entertained by blunt force violence. … We see a lot of images of people getting hit in the head.”
We see it not just in the NFL, but in cartoons and comedies and action movies. And because brain injuries are so often invisible, we feel less urgency about them compared to other combat injuries.
“If everybody understood these blasts could take years off somebody’s life, I think it would change people’s behavior,” said Chris Nowinski, CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “But the fact that the consequences are years down the line slows our learning, and our inspiration to make change.”
Will it really take more Robert Cards to wake us up?