NEW YORK — In an offseason marked by Junior Seau’s suicide and scores of lawsuits over brain injuries, the NFL on Thursday launched a comprehensive wellness program for current and retired players – including a confidential mental health phone line.

“There is no higher priority for the National Football League than the health and wellness of our players,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in an email Thursday to more than 11,000 players announcing NFL Total Wellness. “This service is here for you.”

An outside agency will run NFL Life Line, a free consultation service to inform players and family members about the signs of crisis, symptoms of common mental health problems, as well as where to get help. Experts in suicide prevention and substance abuse are among those involved in developing and administering the program.

The website for the program also features special video messages from various NFL stars, including Brett Favre, Michael Irvin, Michael Strahan, Herschel Walker, Jevon Kearse and Cris Carter, urging players to get help and know they are not alone.

Shannon Jordan, president of the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund, a charity for NFL retirees who need health care, said the program is long overdue.

“Unfortunately sometimes it takes a tragedy to put something together quicker, but we’re just happy that it’s finally here and we’ll keep expanding on it,” said Jordan, who is part of the NFL’s effort.

“There are a lot of pieces that still need to be worked out, but we couldn’t be more elated to be able to refer guys to a program like this and hopefully save a lot more lives.”

The announcement came as many training camps are getting under way.

It also comes just days after former Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler became the latest big name from the NFL’s past to sue the league over head injuries.

Stabler is the first plaintiff among 73 listed in a federal lawsuit filed Monday in Philadelphia, where other cases involving some of the more than 2,400 NFL veterans suing the league were recently consolidated into a master complaint.

Like Stabler, the other retirees claim the NFL did not do enough to shield them from the long-term effects of repeated hits to the head, even when medical evidence established a connection between head trauma in football and health problems later in life.

Stabler, 66, claimed in the lawsuit he has experienced cognitive difficulties, including headaches, dizziness, depression, fatigue, sleep problems, irritability and numbness/tingling in his spine.

Seau’s family recently requested that brain tissue of the NFL linebacker be sent to the National Institutes of Health for examination.

The former All-Pro died May 2 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. He was 43, just 2 1/2 years retired from a career that saw him picked for 12 Pro Bowls.

His death had similarities to that of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest last year. Duerson left a suicide note, asking that his brain be studied for signs of trauma.

NFL officials said while Seau’s death was high profile, the league’s suicide numbers across the board are low. They said in the past 25 years there have been 13 documented suicides by those who played in the NFL.

Nonetheless, after Seau died, both the NFL and the players’ union acknowledged more could be done to provide mental health services.

While not mentioning the lawsuits or deaths, Goodell’s emailed letter noted that members of the NFL family are not immune to challenges all individuals face.

The Plaintiffs Executive Committee for the NFL concussion litigation said in a statement Thursday afternoon that the latest program lends credence to lawsuits against the league.

“The NFL engaged in a decades-long campaign of deceit and deception to actively conceal from its players the risks they faced from repeated head impacts,” said the statement emailed to The Associated Press. “This latest initiative is admission of this fact. Ultimately, it will not provide the security and care these former players so desperately need.”

Troy Vincent, vice president of NFL Player Engagement, said the NFL already had some programs in place but the confidential lifeline run by an outside agency is a step forward, as are efforts to take away the stigma associated with mental health issues.

The video messages emphasize that.

Irvin, in a poignant message filmed last month, addressed his “brothers” and urged them to be open.

“We are part of an NFL family,” Irvin said. “We do have to look out for one another the way we did on the football field. … We have to share with one another … but we don’t talk. We shut up and … we implode. We put ourselves in isolation and that’s the worst thing you can do.”

Thursday’s announcement came following a meeting at NFL offices attended by Goodell, Jordan, Dr. David Satcher, a former U.S. Surgeon General, along with Vincent and Robert Gulliver, NFL executive vice president of human resources and chief diversity officer. Vincent and Gulliver will direct the program.

Satcher has conducted 14 mental health forums for NFL retired players over the past two years and will coordinate more events across the country as well as online webinars.

Gulliver and Vincent are charged with establishing an advisory board that will include former players and coaches and medical professionals. The board in part will help develop a training program for peer counselors and transition coaches.

“We want to make sure we’re providing the right services, that they’re accessible and easy to use,” Gulliver said.

The NFL Player Care Foundation also will build upon its national health screening program for former players, with Hall of Famers Dick Butkus and Mike Haynes serving as ambassadors.

“The thing that’s very important, and groundbreaking really, is also its inclusion of family members, having family members be able to call the line as well,” said Timothy Lineberry, a Mayo Clinic psychiatrist and suicide expert in Rochester, Minn. “It’s a confidential line, and we know that people are willing to call a confidential line to get help and get resources and be able to get somewhere where they can get help.”

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The recent Colorado massacre gives a picture of a bright young man seemingly of good mind and body snapping into the devil himself, shooting 70 unknown individuals. The speculation is that this young man is simply evil, or as a mental health professional would likely presume, acting out a brewing psychosis.

Ted Jackson, The Times-Picayune archiveSaluting officers lined up in March 2008 in honor of slain officer Nicola Cotton as the hearse passed the 6th district police station on Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Adults with the symptoms of mental illness can go eight to 10 years without being diagnosed. This is often the case for those who have the profile of the alleged shooter, James Holmes: Smart, somewhat withdrawn, able to hold on to some sanity until the final snap. Sanity is lost in a grand delusion, skewing reality for the sufferer and untold pain and suffering for the victims.

For many with the beginnings of mental illness symptoms, fragmentation of mind exists, leading to fear and withdrawal from the community. Without early diagnosis, proper treatment and support systems in place to nurture one back to wellness, the consequences for some can indeed be deadly.

On the streets of New Orleans we have seen this all too often. Many cases go without fanfare, yet a few draw attention: case in point, the killing of Officer Nicola Cotton, allegedly at the hands of Bernel Johnson, a man with chronic paranoid schizophrenia who had just been released from a local mental health care facility.

Her death created a large response from state leaders. Gov. Bobby Jindal pledged an abundance of mental health care and laws to be put in place immediately so that this tragedy would never happen again. A year later in response to a budget shortfall, he closed New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, a 40-bed facility managing chronically mentally ill adults.

As a crisis technician with the New Orleans Police Department, I lived the reality of the mental health crisis daily. What I witnessed was what I would label medical discrimination. As difficult as the calls for service were, at times it did not equal the combativeness from other medical professionals as we attempted to demand care for the mentally ill patient.

For years after Katrina when no mental health beds were offered at any local hospital, the challenge was at times unbearable. Today, emergency rooms continue to be overwhelmed, and the jails are inundated with mental health patients who committed a crime, often as a result of not getting adequate care. The community-based services that do exist have waiting lists and must often raise the bar on how sick one must be to get served

Yet, the response to all seems to be a continued loss of inpatient mental health services. After the closure of New Orleans Adolescent Hospital in 2009, the closure of Greenwell Springs followed in 2012. Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville will close its doors in October. In addition, Louisiana State University Hospital in New Orleans closed one of its emergency mental health trailers, an entire 20-bed detoxification unit and nine inpatient beds at its Calhoun Street campus.

Upon leaving the NOPD I became involved in a housing program for adults with chronic mental illness. The program that I am with provides a true model of restoration of the mind. We have a beautiful facility with an abundance of mental health professionals on hand. Our folks are given housing, community-based services and a lot of love and care. But even given that, they are in need of periodic hospitalizations to tweak medication in a safe facility.

Chronic mental illness demands a combination of support systems for stabilization. One piece taken out, such as hospitalization, wreaks havoc on the rest.

The state’s decision to repeatedly place the burden of budget shortfalls on the shoulders of those with chronic mental illness is truly insane. There are no savings in this decision. The cost of managing these folks through repeated emergency service and incarcerations will far exceed the reported saving of $1.9 million, as well as the fact that the cost of life is priceless.

The Colorado shooter’s problems unfortunately went unidentified, with deadly consequences. We in Louisiana have identified thousands of folks who live in our midst with mental illness, some who have proven violent tendencies. To not provide adequate care is pure negligence. We cannot simply pick and choose which medical disabilities to treat. All are worthy of medical attention, mental illness included.

••••••••

Cecile W. Tebo is a licensed clinical social worker and crisis intervention specialist. She can be reached at cecile@crisis504.com.

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by Ted Rall

COMMENTARY

We don’t know why James Holmes, the 24-year-old suspect, shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. We don’t know his mental state. Given the legal presumption of innocence, we shouldn’t write with certainty that it was him.

Given how the 24-hour news cycle has expanded the American media’s love of speculation, however, the Batman Bloodbath became fodder for political policy prescriptions the moment the first round left the chamber of an AR-15 that night.  

We saw it after Columbine, when conservatives blamed goth, video games and the so-called “trenchcoat mafia.” Liberals (me included) set their sights on bullying jocks. The political debate ultimately prompted schools to adopt increased security measures and zero tolerance policies against bullying. State legislatures passed minor gun control laws.

These all may have been good ideas. Yet—they didn’t stop it from happening again.

---

 

The gun control debate took center stage after student Seung-Hui Cho, shot 32 people to death at Virginia Tech in 2007. Liberals said people with a history of mental health issues shouldn’t be able to buy guns. Arguing that Cho’s victims would have been able to defend themselves had they been packing, right-wingers pushed to allow students to carry weapons onto campuses.

Some commentators wondered aloud whether the United States should make it easier for people with mental health issues to seek and obtain help. But that line of discussion was quickly drowned out by the gun control debate.

Now the pattern is repeating itself. We know what happened, but we don’t know why.

We know that high-powered automatic weaponry was involved. Most of us assume that Holmes, though purportedly intelligent and educated, was deranged. Why else would anyone slaughter innocent strangers in a movie theater?

Given these assumptions, which may turn out be wrong—the Fort Hood shooter, thought by some to be suffering from PTSD, was most likely “self radicalized” by U.S. foreign policy, making the killings a political act—it follows that we would try to prevent future similar tragedies by promoting policies in line with our personal ideological preconceptions, and that the political class and their media allies would promote themselves by marketing such “solutions” to us voters and consumers.

Setting aside the caveat that we still don’t know why it happened, the big guns, crazy, young white guy dynamic leads to two obvious policy prescriptions: gun control and improving access to mental health care. Post-Aurora, we’re seeing a lot of the former, including calls for numerical limits on ammo sales—but relatively few of the latter.

David Brooks, a conservative columnist at The New York Times, is an interesting exception. “These killers are primarily the product of psychological derangements, not sociological ones,” Brooks writes. But even he won’t call for a national war on mental illness: “The best way to prevent killing sprees is with relationships—when one person notices that a relative or neighbor is going off the rails and gets that person treatment before the barbarism takes control. But there also has to be a more aggressive system of treatment options, especially for men in their 20s.”

Unfortunately, not everyone has a relative or a concerned neighbor. Without a real commitment to treating, and thus de-stigmatizing mental illness—in other words, providing free, simple, and easy access to mental health professionals for everyone—they’re empty words.

A 2008 study found that 6% of Americans suffer from serious mental illnesses, which resulted in an estimated economic loss of $200 billion annually in lost earnings. (This doesn’t include the one-quarter of the population who have less serious, diagnosable conditions.)

Sixty percent of people with mental illness seek no treatment whatsoever. It’s easy to see why: Americans with limited funds must make do with a lame hodgepodge of options when they feel themselves going off the rails: suicide prevention hotlines, support groups, and absurdly low allocations of shrink visits under group insurance plans.

Along with vision and dental care, mental health is an ugly stepsister of America’s frayed healthcare infrastructure, regarded as a supplemental luxury, and funded accordingly. If Obama’s health care reform law isn’t overturned by a Romney administration, it will help make “mental health parity”—forcing insurers to treat mental illness at the same priority level as physical ailments—a practical reality. But, failing a public option—or, what we really need, fully socialized medicine—the overall plan doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Gun control talk is cheap. A national mental healthcare system that works would be expensive. Would either one prevent the next shooting spree? Maybe. Maybe not. Like zero tolerance for bullying, they might be a good idea no matter what.

Ted Rall is a columnist, cartoonist, author and independent war journalist. He is the winner of numerous awards and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His new book is The Book of Obama: How We Got From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt. 

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