After the recent shooting at a Manhattan high rise by a gunman who left writing that stated he suffered from CTE, the connection between concussions, mental illness, and suicide is in the news again. The shooter, a star football player in high school, according to reports, drove from Las Vegas to New York with the intention of harming people in the offices of the National Football League. Instead, he entered the wrong elevator in the Park Avenue building where the NFL officers were located, and indiscriminately killed four people before killing himself.

In recent years, studies on CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or degeneration of the brain caused by repeated head trauma—have raised troubling concerns. At this time, there isn’t an accurate diagnostic test for CTE in living brains. It only can be found postmortem, during autopsies. If that changes, it “will be........

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