It is frequently and plausibly argued that a prominent group at-risk of CTE are those who play contact sports: high profile case studies (e.g. 44)ĬTE is associated with a single significant risk-factor: repetitive mild traumatic head injury. ‘ … clinically associated with symptoms of irritability, impulsivity, aggression, depression, short-term memory loss and heightened suicidality … With advancing disease, more severe neurological changes develop that include dementia, gait and speech abnormalities and parkinsonism.’ ( McKee et al., 2013, p. Hernandez was no longer depicted as totally Other but was instead brought into contact with others who play football or experience other forms of dementia.Ĭhronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is a neurodegenerative disease Second, diagnosis itself did significantly affect media depictions of Hernandez, his crimes, and death by, third, rendering Hernandez as less monstrous. First, and contrary to prominent theses which suggest that medicine and neuroscience have been centralized within contemporary discourse, media outlets largely did not discuss the possibility of CTE prior to Hernandez's posthumous diagnosis. From this analysis I draw three conclusions. I use the Hernandez case to examine the ways in which neuroscience in general, and CTE in particular, shape articulations of subjectivity within the contemporary news media. Hernandez's American story of sport, celebrity, and violence had become enmeshed with biology, medicine, and the brain. CTE is believed to be caused by repetitive mild traumatic brain injury, quite possibly suffered on the football field. Upon investigation it was discovered that Hernandez was suffering from an advanced case of CTE, a neurodegenerative disease associated with aggression, depression, and symptoms similar to Alzheimer's disease. Patterson et al., 2018), what happened next was perceived as a harbinger of an American future: Hernandez's brain was removed from his body and sent to Boston University's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center.
If Hernandez's path from sporting glory, to celebrity, to violence, and finally self-inflicted death was believed by many to be a profoundly American story (e.g. Hernandez's death came just two years after a conviction for first-degree murder and five years since he scored a touchdown in the 2012 Superbowl for the New England Patriots. I conclude by considering how the specific narrative of CTE-as-acquired-dementia shapes depictions of Hernandez's subjectivity and discuss how this case troubles existing literatures on the neurologization of selfhood.Īt 3am on April 19th, 2017 ex-American Footballer Aaron Hernandez was found dead in his prison cell having apparently hanged himself. Third, the diagnosis of CTE goes someway to normalizing the behaviour of Hernandez, rendering his behaviours comprehensible. Second, CTE is foregrounded after the diagnosis and is used to explain much of Hernandez's behaviour.
I make three conclusions: First, the disease is not mentioned prior to diagnosis with family instability, friendship groups, individual psychology, and the entitlement of celebrity foregrounded. I examine newspaper coverage of the Hernandez case, focusing upon the murder, arrests, conviction, suicide, and diagnosis of CTE in order to examine understandings of Hernandez's subjectivity.
Hernandez was posthumously diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease associated with violence, depression, and dementia-like symptoms. In 2017, two years after being found guilty of murder and five years after scoring in the Super Bowl, Aaron Hernandez died by suicide in his prison cell. This paper examines the entanglement of medicine, brain injury, and subjectivity within newspaper discourse and through the case of ex-American footballer Aaron Hernandez.