Can only speak for myself, but I watched my brother go from a really well adjusted dude who was in design school, slayed with the ladies, was loved by the parents of his girlfriends, and was generally a stand-up dude, to thinking he was gay, that his landlord was spying on him, that people in corner stores all were talking about him right before he opened the door, writing lyrics he wrote all over the walls of his apartment, chainsmoking cigs and ashing on his carpet, sleeping in the bathtub for safety, etc. This was between age 21 and 22, and hit like a truck.

My family has resources, and got him great doctors once we realized what was happening, but it took us an embarrassingly long time to realize that this wasn't just him getting a little crazy at the end of college.

He had to be institutionalized for a bit just to control his environment and make sure he didn't do anything stupid/illegal, but he's been medicated for five years now, getting better all the time. He works full-time as a designer, owns a house, and has a great dog.

We have no history of mental illness in our family, not even the more subtle stuff, and definitely not the schizophrenia he was diagnosed with.

Maybe had something to do with the >5 black-out "where am I?" style concussions he got in HS playing fullback and rugby...

It's embarrassing how little is known about this stuff, and it's because the brain is incredibly complex. It's hard to control for variables so it's hard to learn anything of consequence. The more we learn though the more it's clear that most irrationally crazy/aggressive behavior can be linked to mental illness and/or brain trauma of some kind.

If people aren't bringing it up in the bar, it's probably because it's ethically complicated to support a sport where the athletes are damaging the organ that makes them them, and in the interest of a pleasant afternoon/evening, it's not really worth getting into the incredibly complex and depressing topic.