Football players kill themselves for the same reason the Hollywood actors and actresses/musicians do. They get past their prime and miss the paychecks and the glory.
Not true for persons with CTE. Suicide is their mischosen but unstoppable action, in most cases, because the dying brain that has defined who they are makes them no longer that capable person. Their brains (neural functions) start actually dying in vascular supply, in actual nerve fibers dying, thus connections are dying. Imagine your frustration attempting to take a "must-do" roadtrip with more & more of the highways washed out, more unserviceable? Your CTE brain is turning to mush. Your executive function (ability to carry out most any complex task) is not there anymore because of an ongoing advancing degeneration of your brain's tissues.
Persons with undamaged brains cannot understand age-triggered CTE symptoms. To relate to you what your brain organically turning to "mush" is :
1) Neuropsychiatric disorders = psychosis, random bouts of delirium & progressive dimentia
2) Cerebrovascular accident = micro-strokes throughout his brain
3) Ocular = optic nerve dysfunction + fouled visual processing center. This yields "glitches" in vision yielding stationary images that move, objects appearing in exaggerated large size. These come & go lasting about 1 minute.
CTE leads to personality changes, always for the worse. Brain rage (not roid-rage), cognitive impairment (making you gradually "stupid" to those around you.) There is vertigo, ataxia to the point of stumping the toe of your shoe on level flooring, new clumsiness due to dysfunction in proprioception - putting your glass back on the counter but hitting it & sloshing water out, etc.
No telling how Alzheimer victims' suicides would skyrocket if it were not for the awareness areas of their brains being destroyed early on in the arrival of symptoms.
TBI (traumatic brain injury) is typically from one single acute concussive blow to the brain, but it can produce brain dysfunctions similar to CTE dysfunctions. These are what many of our veterans return with. It gets lumped in with PTSD, and that's a disservice to them. Too bad veterans don't have an advocacy organization as wealthy-motivated as the NFL is for their game "heroes".