At some point over his 30 years of playing rugby for several Welsh clubs and for Wales Sevens, Pook suffered a brain haemorrhage. <\/p>\n
He knows this because it was discovered during an assessment. <\/p>\n
Neurological tests showed Pook had post-concussion syndrome and disrupted emotional circuitry. <\/p>\n
He said it explained his severe bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts. <\/p>\n
“Traumatic brain injury or concussion can significantly impact somebody’s emotional regulation and can cause depression, conditions like dementia and motor neurone disease,” explained Lauren Vickery, a psychotherapist at Sporting Chance, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pook is now part of the class-action lawsuit that more than 1,100 former rugby players<\/a> are taking against the sport’s governing bodies. <\/p>\n They allege the governing bodies were negligent in failing to take reasonable action to protect them from serious brain injuries. The governing bodies deny any liability.<\/p>\n Yet Pook still has a love for rugby and believes the sport can save lives. <\/p>\n “We didn’t know about significant concussion back then, we just brushed it off,” he said. “I hope it would never happen today, because the rules have changed.”<\/p>\n For the past eight months Pook has been having therapy with Vickery and says his progress has been “miraculous”.<\/p>\n Therapy has prompted Pook to found Tackle Suicide CIC, a non-profit organisation which campaigns for suicide prevention, raises awareness of mental health in elite rugby and fundraises for amateur rugby players in need of counselling.<\/p>\n Pook will make another visit to the sea this weekend after Scotland’s match against Italy<\/a> in Rome and England’s game with Wales at Twickenham<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At some point over his 30 years of playing rugby for several Welsh clubs and for Wales Sevens,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-463092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}