Stan Kutcher coached minor sports for years while his kids were growing up. And he recalls some tense moments when he tried to apply his medical knowledge of brain injuries to the field of play.
“I remember as a coach, in very competitive hockey levels, sitting players because I thought they ‘got their bell rung,’” explained Dr. Kutcher, the Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health, to a room of athletes, parents, physicians and media last week.
“And you should have heard the comments from the parents. They didn’t realize how much danger their child was in. I had the luxury of being a physician and understanding that.”
These days, thankfully, such knowledge isn’t so luxurious. High-profile injuries in professional sports have increased awareness of the severity of concussions and other brain injuries. Still, though, stigmas about toughness and competitiveness play a role in how injuries are handled in minor sports, and there is much work to be done to ensure young people, coaches, parents and teachers understand best practices for not just treating, but recovering from brain injuries and returning back to regular activities.
Last week, Dr. Kutcher and his team at the Sun Life Financial Chair unveiled a new education initiative designed to help that process. It’s a pair of publications—one for youth, and one for parents, coaches and teachers—designed to empower smart decisions about brain health.
“We’re doing this for one purpose: we are trying to do our very best to improve the lives of kids and their parents here in Nova Scotia, and across Canada,” said Dr. Kutcher, who is also a staff psychiatrist at the IWK Health Centre.
Taking brain injuries seriously
The largest percentage of brain injuries in Canada occurs in young people under the age of 20. But it’s not just sport that’s a factor: other lifestyle activities—cycling, skiing, even just playing on the schoolyard—can lead to concussions and brain injuries as well.
That’s why the Sun Life Financial Chair is casting a wide net in distributing the books. Coaches, teachers, parents and anyone else interested can download them for free from the chair's website, teenmentalhealth.org, or they can order physical copies through the website. Thanks to a sponsorship from HMCS Toronto, the books will be distributed across Nova Scotia’s public libraries. And Baseball Canada is footing the bill for a French translation, coming soon, and will distribute the books to national teams and provincial organizations across the country.
Dr. Kutcher highlighted that the youth edition is “written for young people, by experts but also with young people. All the work that we do involves our youth advisory board, and a lot of young people helped out with the writing itself.” He added that the books deal not just with what to do in the immediate aftermath of a concussion, but also how to properly return to play – and to learn.
“We know that concussions can lead to mental health problems. It can start with trouble concentrating, forgetting things, difficulty staying organized. And some people may go on to get depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder. They may see personality differences… that’s why questions about concussions and sport should be part of the assessment that’s done when a young person shows symptoms of depression.”
Supporting smart play
The project’s sponsors include Dalhousie, the IWK Health Centre, the Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation, the Government of Nova Scotia and more. It also boasts an incredible list of endorsers, including Sport Nova Scotia, Doctors Nova Scotia, AthletesCan, the Brain Injury Association of Canada and many more health and sport associations nationwide.
Among the more famous supporters is Member of Parliament Justin Trudeau, who was supposed to attend the book launch but got stranded at the St. John’s airport due to fog. He did, however, deliver a video greeting via iPad.
“When you do get an injury, you have to pay attention to the signs and take it seriously,” he advised the young athletes in attendance. “Ultimately, it’s your brain that allows you to do everything else, and there’s no point playing sports if you’re not capable of enjoying it fully and being smart about it."
It was an important point that Dr. Kutcher echoed.
“It’s great to be competitive, and to win,” he said. “But you have to win in a way that’s fair, and in a way that’s brain smart.”