There was a story that caught my eye recently. Early last year—March 18, 2024, to be exact—former NHL enforcer Chris Simon took his own life. This has been a far too common occurrence in the last handful of years. Whether it is Steve Montador (whose story was behind the initial founding of SkateGuard), Wade Belak, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien or one of many other hockey players who have taken their own lives, one is still too many.
A postmortem of Simon’s brain showed evidence of Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE is a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated trauma to the head. Given that Simon fought more than 100 times as a professional, and who knows how many more times in youth hockey and junior hockey—he had 413 penalty minutes in his OHL career—Simon certainly fits the definition of repeated trauma to the head.
As a society, we have dedicated a lot of time, energy and resources to shining a light on the dangers of mental health struggles. We have certainly made some progress in reducing the stigma around mental health.
One subset of mental health that I would propose has not experienced this “thawing of the discourse” would be those who may be, or who may be at risk of, experiencing the impacts of CTE.
Now, that’s not to say that the diagnosis and treatment of brain injuries hasn’t come a long way in a relatively short period of time. The days of “how many fingers am I holding up” were not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. I can recount to you stories of players intentionally bombing “baseline tests” at the start of the season, so that if they got hit during the year, their baseline would be so low that so long as they could fog a mirror, they could pass their concussion test.
But when it comes to speaking up, or having frank conversations grounded in reality about the impact of concussions and the long-term ramifications, I am of the view that we still have a long way to go.
For non-sports related instances of mental health challenges, we continue to improve as a society with regards to framing these challenges as something that happens to you, not something that you have done to yourself. Unfortunately, I do not get the same sense about issues of CTE-induced mental health challenges. In my experience, the tone, sentiment and attitude around groups of hockey players is still one of a reluctance to talk about such issues. I have even found that more players and former players are far more willing to talk about non-sports-related mental health challenges. But any time the issue of CTE comes up, very few are willing to discuss.
There continues to be a stigma around it, in my experience. Both the verbal and non-verbal communication convey an attitude that CTE is something that we as hockey players allowed to happen to us. That we weren’t tough enough. That we didn’t protect ourselves. Didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Lost too many fights.
If better outcomes are to be achieved, this is something that we have to address. A few years ago, there was a group of players spearheaded by Daniel Carcillo and Nick Boynton that was working on mitigating the effects of CTE, but very little has been reported on this recently.
Objectively, the game generally is taking steps to mitigate the impact of this condition. When I was growing up, I was eight years old when I began body-checking. Now, players are well into their teenage years in the province of Ontario before body contact is allowed. And while I certainly have some hesitations about waiting that long to start body contact, it undoubtedly sends a message that the sport is looking for ways to limit the cumulative impact of head trauma.
Also, fighting is down across virtually all levels of hockey. When I played in the USHL, fights were very common, and the penalty was a mere five minutes for fighting and on you go. Now, players are issued a game misconduct. Canada’s major junior leagues used to be a simple “five for fighting” environment. That still exists—for your first three fights of the season. Any additional fights beyond that come with a two-game suspension. Fighting is way down in the NHL also: there were only two fights in the entire 2024-2025 postseason.
While these are obviously positive steps, we as a hockey community need to continue to do more to change the attitude towards conditions such as CTE. Mental health is such a wide-ranging, complex, ever-evolving topic, and there’s been a ton of good work that’s been done in so many areas. My hope is that we can continue to find ways to make sure that players feel safe reaching out about the possible impacts, effects and action items around CTE, so that we can hopefully have fewer stories like Chris Simon’s.
