NFL Players Who Advocate for Mental Health Awareness: Breaking the Stigma

The continuous head injuries sustained by NFL players from collision sports such as football expose them to increased risk of mental issues including depression, confusion, and aggression. The eventual damage to the human brain after these kinds of injuries results in CTE, a degenerative brain disease. Exacerbating these negative attitudes about mental health problems is professional football's ultra-masculine culture, which teaches players-through various means, including teammates and coaches-to "suck it up" and "push through" when things get tough. This makes it all but impossible to discuss psychological pain openly. This underlines the need for improved mental health care for NFL players. Here's how some top football stars cope with their own psychological struggles and what they want others who might be struggling to know.Bobby WagnerIn January 2023, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest after tackling a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals-a horrible and terrifying incident for NFL players and personnel along with fans, including Rams linebacker Bobby Wagner. As per Los Angeles Rams, Wagner urged players to take time to process their feelings about what happened.“You have traumatic experiences, you have to find a way to deal with them,” Wagner told reporters. “The best way to deal with them is expressing those feelings. The thing that we’re taught to do in this sport because it’s such a quote, unquote ‘manly sport’ is to hide your feelings, hide your emotions, and any expression of these feelings and emotions makes you less of a man. I think that’s a myth. Talking about your feelings, talking about things that affect you mentally, physically are more manly than anything because it takes a lot of courage to talk about those things.”Dak PrescottDallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott talked publicly about his depression following the death of his mother from colon cancer in 2013, the COVID-19 pandemic and his brother Jace's suicide in April 2020. Suicide was the second leading underlying cause of death for adults aged 25-34 in 2020 within the United States.“It’s crazy. All throughout the offseason, this quarantine and this offseason, I started experiencing emotions I’ve never felt before — anxiety for the main one,” Prescott revealed in an interview for In Depth With Graham Bensinger that aired in September 2020. “And then honestly a couple of days before my brother passed, I would say I started experiencing depression. I didn’t know necessarily what I was going through, to say the least, and hadn’t been sleeping at all.”A.J. BrownPhiladelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown once talked about depression and suicidal thoughts in an Instagram video, since deleted, back in November 2021, when he was with the Tennessee Titans. In the video, he indicated that one night in November of 2020, he wanted to take his life. “I had no more hope for better days, and everything was just going wrong for me," Brown said in the video.“I didn’t know, really didn’t take into consideration what depression really was. I always just brushed it off. That’s how I grew up. I just brushed off my feelings, and it got the best of me,” Brown explained at a press conference posted online on November 18, 2021, by Tennessee Titans, a few days after his Instagram video went live.