Suicide, says Val Vickerman, prompts a torrent of painful questions. “It brings out a lot of the whats and whys, the could’ves, the should’ves,” she says, and the tragic conclusion she has reached is that though her son, Dan, who played rugby 63 times for Australia, took his own life nearly four years ago, it was actually the game he loved that did it. She will never know for certain, and that makes the grief ever harder. Nevertheless, she is convinced that Dan suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, more commonly referred to now as CTE, a degenerative disease of the brain which has been found in people, particularly former sportspeople, with a history of repetitive brain trauma. In other words, she believes it was too

Source: The Times January 11, 2021 17:15 UTC