Column: Mental health no longer dirty words in macho world of NHL

Hockey players are celebrated for their toughness. It’s common for a player to absorb a booming hit without flinching, or to lose a row of teeth to an errant puck and say he’s sorry he had to miss a shift to get sewn up. Tape an aspirin to it and get back out there was the game’s unofficial slogan.....

.....That archaic code is fading, its departure hastened by former NHL goaltenders Kelly Hrudey and Corey Hirsch. In talking about their struggles and advocating for mental health awareness and treatment they’ve elevated a discussion that became especially relevant when the COVID-19 pandemic isolated people and clouded the future....

......“I was going through these things where my brain was telling me, ‘I don’t know if you can do this any longer. I don’t know if you can stay at this level.’ It was just putting all this doubt in my head,” he said. “I was to learn later from our daughter Kaitlin about the loop in a person’s brain and I didn’t have the skills at that point to break the loop. I had no tools to do it, so that loop kept getting louder and louder.”......