We don’t yet know for sure that concussions produced the physical and emotional problems that contributed to wrestler/football player Kosta Karageorge’s suicide at Ohio State University. But while we’re all thinking about the question, recall this 2012 New York Times story about an already accomplished young wrestler who decided he’d had one too many hits.

A charismatic athlete from Minnesota who was pegged by some wrestling experts as a future Olympic medalist, [Jake] Deitchler retired in January [at age 22] because of the cumulative effects of about a dozen concussions.

Deitchler sat out a year and a half before wrestling briefly last fall for the University of Minnesota, when symptoms like fogginess returned…

… Deitchler still has short-term memory lapses. But his symptoms are not as severe as two years ago, he said, when he drove his moped on the wrong side of a street near the University of Minnesota, and fell asleep at a youth meet where he was supposed to be coaching.

“His concussion problems were really bad, and I didn’t know what was going on,” said Brandon Paulson, Deitchler’s former coach and the co-director of PINnacle. “He was forgetting everything. He was forgetting to show up to practice. He was really messed up.”

… Deitchler deferred acceptance to Minnesota to train in Greco-Roman full time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Though bothered by headaches, nausea and blurred vision, Deitchler kept wrestling. “I didn’t have necessarily short-term memory problems,” he said. “It wasn’t really affecting me too bad.”

Things worsened in 2009 after he enrolled at Minnesota. In the first month of practice, a senior trying to escape a hold drove his head into Deitchler’s chin. “I was just in a daze, and it didn’t go away,” he said. “It lasted months.”

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From an article this morning in the Washington Post:

One study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in January of this year, found that repeatedly-concussed teens are three times more likely to develop depression. A separate paper, published in PLoS One last spring, suggested that teens with a history of head injury are at “significantly greater odds” of attempting suicide and “engaging in numerous violent behaviors.”

… One study, published in Clinics in Sports Medicine in 2005, analyzed 71 athletes who had either contemplated or committed suicide over the last several decades. Nearly half were found to be football players. More than 60 of the athletes were men. And the median age was 22. One such player was a Duke lineman named Ted McNairy, who committed suicide years after playing. [The paper went on to say:] “Of the 1.5 million high school players in the United States, 250,000 have a concussion in a given season. … Concussions on the field are probably underreported, both because they can be subtle, and because of football’s ‘rub-dirt-on-it ethos.”

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From an article in The Daily Beast:

Should CTE be found, Karageorge will join Andre Waters, Ray Easterling, Dave Duerson, Terry Long, Junior Seau, Paul Oliver, Shane Dronett, and Jovan Belcher in an ever-growing list of athletes with CTE who took their own lives and were wracked by memory loss, disorientation, cognitive issues, mood and personality changes, and crushing depression.

And yes, this is the point where we mention that even the NFL admits that nearly three in 10 former players will develop some form of debilitating brain injury in their lifetimes as a result of playing football. Concussion-related illnesses are usually presumed to be an issue for older, retired players, but Karageorge’s death at age 22 would set that myth aflame.

Then again, you would hope that notion would have gone the way of the dodo bird after a 29-year-old soccer player was found to have CTE after his autopsy, and an Olympic wrestler retired at 22.

… The treatment of concussed players in college football made headlines earlier this season when the University of Michigan’s athletic director, David Brandon, resigned in large part over Head Coach Brady Hoke’s mind-boggling decision to send a clearly concussed quarterback back out onto the field.

Ohio State’s football coach, Urban Meyer, or Athletic Director Gene Smith must be made to pay a similar price should it be found that Karageorge was already suffering from some form of traumatic brain injury when he committed suicide, or if the school’s policy was in any way negligent.

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From a comment thread in the OSU newspaper:

How many of these sad stories must we have before universities [acknowledge] the contradiction between educating a brain while traumatizing it?