More Than Mental Health

Multiple football players have met a similar, terrible fate over the past year.  This pattern has yielded a common appeal to caring for the mental health of yourself and those around you.  While I don't necessarily think that emphasis is a bad thing, I do think it serves to redirect one's attention away from a common theme of such cases.  To understand this pattern, let's briefly examine the reporting on these cases.

From the reporting on Marshawn Kneeland:

"On the night Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland died, the team's director of security, Cable Johnson, called law enforcement to ask for a welfare check on Kneeland and to tell police Kneeland had sent a text saying he didn't want to go to jail.

"He sent out some group texts that are concerning -- probably mental health -- but the group texts seemed to be saying goodbye -- made some statement about not able to go to prison or to jail," Johnson told Plano police dispatch, according to audio obtained by ESPN through a public records request.

Kneeland died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound last week. Police found his body in the early morning last Thursday after he had evaded officers during a pursuit and fled on foot. Police have not said what prompted the pursuit."

From the reporting on Doug Martin:

"Doug's parents were actively seeking medical assistance for him and had contacted local authorities for support," Athletes First said. "Feeling overwhelmed and disoriented, Doug fled his home during the night and entered a neighbor's residence two doors down, where he was taken into custody by police. An investigation into what transpired as he was detained is underway."

From the reporting on Kyren Lacy:

"According to Harris County authorities, police responded to a call from a female family member who said Lacy had discharged a firearm into the ground during a verbal argument late Saturday night. When they arrived on the scene, they learned that the suspect, Lacy, had fled in a vehicle.

Authorities say their pursuit of Lacy ended when he crashed. They say that when officers approached the vehicle to extract Lacy, he had died from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound." 

To be fair, the Kyren Lacy case is seemingly complicated by the fact that the state of Lousiana was looking to bring charges for negligent homicide against him.  But even so, when you spend a few minutes looking into the basis of the charges, it gets incredibly fishy.  In any case, when you consider these cases together you begin to see how the specter of our prison system and the presence of police is at the very least a contributing factor in many incidents popularly categorized as "mental health" issues.  This of course does not mean that "mental health" is not a useful lens for understanding the struggles these athletes faced.  However, if our conception of "mental health" is as atomized and depoliticized as it often appears to be, then it simply cannot be a gateway towards addressing the root causes of these deaths.  When someone is going through a crisis, it is indeed critical to, per the words of Matt Rhule in the first link, "all be there for them."  But for that presence to be a meaningful contribution to preventing the worst cast scenarios, it has to go beyond simple interpersonal niceties and instead seek to actively build of a society where people (especially young black men) are not encouraged to only see one way out of terrible situations.