Daniel Carcillo weighs in on Greg Johnson’s death

The Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan spoke with concussion research advocate Daniel Carcillo regarding the death of former Red Wings forward Greg Johnson, and Carcillo suggested that a history of concussion issues may have contributed to Johnson’s suicide:

“There’s been a pretty steady amount of death it seems,” Carcillo said. “I didn’t know Greg personally but when you hear something like that about a former player  and I’ve battled a fair share of mental health issues  it definitely hits home.

“You want to be respectful to the family, but you also have to talk about it honestly and talk about what happened, because in an effort to educate people about possible signs or symptoms  or getting a discussion going about suicide, mental health, concussions  it all ties in to each other.

“In talking (to former players, teammates of Johnson’s) you get the sense he was a really good guy, from that region of Thunder Bay (Ontario), down to earth, and you feel for everybody involved.”

Continued; I’ll be blunt here–until there’s an autopsy, I believe it’s too early to suggest that Johnson died due to the cumulative effects of brain injuries.

Yes, former and current NHL players are dealing with what is clearly a health crisis regarding cumulative concussions, but suicide is the result of a unique set of circumstances in most cases, and those circumstances have to be respected.

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George Malik

My name is George Malik, and I'm the Malik Report's editor/blogger/poster. I have been blogging about the Red Wings since 2006, when MLive hired me to work their SlapShots blog, and I joined Kukla's Korner in 2011 as The Malik Report. I'm starting The Malik Report as a stand-alone site, hoping that having my readers fund the website is indeed the way to go to build a better community and create better content.