Brain Damage and Mental Health: A Conversation with Erik Magraken

In recognition of World Head Injury Awareness Day, I went Live on Instagram with lawyer and combat sports athlete advocate Erik Magraken to discuss his advocacy work in the head injury and mental health space. Erik’s work has taken him across the continent to speak on an issue close to his heart: legal protection of combat sports athletes.

As you’ll read in the transcribed discussion below, education is the primary tool Erik uses to fight the ignorance surrounding head injuries in sport. His view is progressive and ahead of its time, especially as many leagues and promotions still fail to properly educate their athletes on the long-term risks of repeated brain trauma. Erik is as much—if not more—of a fan of these sports as anyone reading, and he isn’t calling for a softening of elite competition. Rather, he believes combat athletes should be properly compensated for the long-term health risks they face in their work.

It was a true honour to speak with Erik (20 minutes of live discussion in total), and as you’ll see, we only had time to scratch the surface of the work he’s done over his career.

I met Erik years ago in Victoria at a martial arts gym on Hillside Ave., and the man’s got a quiet intensity that demands respect. Back then, when I had more bravado than brains, Erik never shied away from humbling me on the mats. I still remember my ear ringing for a week after a roll—and I knew I had it coming.

Erik now trains five days a week at a low-profile gym in Victoria — one that, with a bit of digging, reveals itself as none other than Royce Gracie BJJ Victoria. Outside his legal work, he’s (allegedly) preparing for retirement from his role as Injury Lawyer and Partner at MacIsaac & Company, he paddle boards, runs the occasional 5K and spends time with family.

It’s been cool watching Erik’s advocacy gain traction. From shoutouts by Chael Sonnen, to appearances in MMA documentaries by Patrick Garvey, to followers on X like Francis Ngannou and yes, Barack Obama—the man’s made an impression.

I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, though I’ll admit I still feel more at home behind a keyboard than a mic and camera. Luckily for me (and for you), Erik brings enough poise and balance to put Conor McGregor on his heels.

For more on Erik’s work, visit CombatSportsLaw.com and FightingFoundation.org.

Enjoy.

Rowan: Hey Eric, you might want to try putting the camera on vertical, if you can. There we go. Perfect.

Rowan: So we’re streaming live here. For everyone who is watching live or who will watch afterwards, welcome to the call. We’re live, and we’re talking about something that affects one in three Canadians throughout their lifetimes – that’s mental health issues. Today, I’m fortunate enough to have my training partner, mentor and friend on the call Erik Magraken. 

Erik is a lawyer based out of Victoria, and has done tremendous work advocating for combat sports athletes for a number of years. He is working to provide these athletes with the type of care they need as they deal with the sometimes mentally debilitating effects and symptoms of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and CTE. Erik, welcome. Thanks for coming on.

Erik: Definitely Rowan, thanks for the invite. I appreciate it.

Rowan: Yeah! it’s really cool to have you here! Today is significant because it is World Head Injury Awareness Day. Head injury is a leading cause of mental health issues around the world. Head injuries at work, in sports or in everyday life, can leave people with debilitating effects and can be detrimental to ones mental health. We’re holding this call to discuss this issue and it’s impact with someone who has been working in this space for quite a while. So let’s just jump right into it.

Erik: Sure. Yeah. Shoot. 

Rowan: Perfect, ao before we deep into your advocacy work, Erik, I’m sure the people would love to hear about your background. Tell us how you inevitably give me started advocating for combat sports athletes. Was there a moment where you realized that this is a cause that you wanted to advocate for?

Erik: Yeah. So, so it happened pretty organically, Rowan, like there wasn’t, there wasn’t a moment where I woke up and I said, this is what I’m going to do “I’m going to be a brain health combat sports advocate”. 

Probably 10 or 15 years ago, I started a blog just talking about very narrow issues in combat sports. It was combat sports, regulatory, legal issues I was discussing. And so over the years, as I was getting this content out there, fighters would reach out to me and they’d ask me to help them with various things, contracts with promoters, contracts with managers, dealing with athletic commissions, licensing issues, suspensions, appealing results, all those kinds of things. And over the years I basically found myself on the side of the fighters, and I saw how much dysfunction there was in the sport. 

There’s a lot of exploitation in combat sports towards the athletes. And I would just continue to talk about this stuff and my work online and over the months and years that attracted like minded people. Then some great people doing similar type work, not legal work, but similar athlete advocacy work reached out to me. Carla Doran from Las Vegas and Rose Gracie, who at the time, was living in California, and they told me they’ve started a foundation, and they asked me to join forces, and I was familiar with some of their work. So I was actually flattered to be asked. And together, it just gave some real direction to the work we were doing. Like, it’s easier, you know? What’s that expression? Many hands make light work, right? So we’re all doing our own thing, but together, it just became a lot easier to set goals and to march towards them so, yeah, it happens slowly over many years.

Rowan: That’s interesting. Hey. So it started with an educational bend. You didn’t have any intentions, you really just wanted to spread the word and make sure that combat sports athletes, had access to the type of information that you had on top of your mind. It’s, it’s in your expertise, you’re a lawyer and a combat sports athlete, you are a combat sports athlete aren’t you?

Erik: Well, I wouldn’t call myself an athlete. I’m a middle aged hobbyist, so I get on the mats five days a week. I just do whatever my 48 year old body lets me do these days.

Rowan: Hey, well, I don’t know why I even asked you that question. Of course you’re an athlete, I’ve rolled with you before, and you’re formidable on the mats. You’re definitely downplaying your skills, Erik. 

Erik: Well, I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah. I just like training, you know, like, while we’re talking about mental health, one of the most important things to maintaining good mental health is getting regular exercise. The key is finding an activity that you really enjoy doing because you’re going to keep doing it if you like doing it. So I’ve just been very lucky to find good people to train with and good facilities to train with, and just unfortunate, my body’s been holding up and I can still do it. 

Rowan: Terrific. 

Rowan: So for many of those tuning in they might not know much about the symptoms of traumatic brain injury, TBI and CTE. I’m not going to try to spell out CTE. I won’t.. you can look that one up. So tell us what life is like for a combat sports athlete dealing with traumatic brain injury or CTE.

Erik: Sure. So first I’ll tackle the CTE word salad for you. It’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and that’s the deadly one. That’s a scary one, because it’s basically a silent disease. When you’re getting hit in the head a whole bunch over the years, you might get a concussion, you might get an injury that you recognize right away. But CTE comes from the repeated blows to the head, and so you don’t realize you have it. The symptoms come on years or sometimes decades later. So you could be an athlete in your teens and your 20s, retire when you’re 30, think you gotta stock free, and in your 40s, all of a sudden you start having this rapid cognitive decline, and it gets worse and worse and worse until it ultimately ends in full blown dementia. It’s a pretty scary thing. There’s no one size fits all when it comes to brain injury.

The answer I have for what it’s like for an athlete dealing with brain injury depends on the severity of the concussion and the speed of the recovery. With a minor concussion the person might fully recover in a few weeks, all the way to a brain injury that kills somebody, or a brain injury that renders them, you know, basically paralyzed for life, and everything in between.

With the work I do, the one thing I realized over the years is just how much, and I’m not saying this word in a negative way, just in a factual way just how much ignorance there is about brain health awareness in the combat sports community. You would think that these sports where brain damage is a constant there would be more education for athletes. On the professional level, brain damage is basically the goal, right? That’s how you win a fight by damaging your opponent, knocking them unconscious, so you would think that these sports would have some of the best understanding about concussions and the realities of CTE, but it’s the polar opposite. 

A lot of people involved in these sports don’t understand some of these basic things, and so some of the work I’ve been doing, and through Fighting Foundation, particularly, we’ve been getting little victories over the finish line. Over the years we have increased how much information is available for combat sports athletes. We’ve been teaming up with doctors, athletic commissions, and fight gyms.We release posters and videos and lobby commissions to share some of this information as part of licensing with athletes. We’re chipping away. We can’t do it overnight, but we’re just trying to chip away at the levels of ignorance in the sport.

My goal is, in the years to come, I’d like every gym owner to understand the dangers of brain injury. I’d like every gym owner to have a concussion policy in place. I’d like every single athletic commission that’s licensing professional athletes to have this information, to make sure they understand it, and that way fighters can make more informed choices about how much trauma they’re exposing themselves to. We want fighters to understand in real, blunt facts, the long term consequences of brain injury. Because I’ve seen a lot of those long term consequences, and it’s, you know, it’s pretty ugly stuff. If we can play a part in preventing it for future generations, I think that’s a worthwhile cause.

Rowan: What kind of advocacy work are they doing to to support combat sports athletes who are dealing with some of the brain injury and the mental health issues that are brought on by their careers in combat sports? You mentioned that you are working with Fighting Foundation? Tell us a bit more about that that and the tools you are using to educate. 

Erik: Yes. So again, I think that the most important work that we’re doing is on the educational front. We’re just trying to up the bar in terms of brain health awareness in combat sports and in fight gyms and for athletes. I could ramble on forever about a lot of the things we have achieved. We’ve got them listed out on our website for anybody that’s interested – fightingfoundation.org – but in terms of broad strokes, these educational initiatives are a big part of what we do. 

Another part of what we do is we connect fighters to resources. A lot of fighters who reach out to us, and it’s usually after their career is over, are dealing with mental health issues. They’re dealing with depression, anxiety, maybe some erratic cognitive decline. We see drug abuse, we see alcohol abuse, we see domestic abuse, and a lot of these guys just need a helping hand. The sad thing is, pro fighters don’t retire with a pension or health insurance. Most pro fighters don’t retire with a lot of money, most notably because most of them don’t make a lot of money during their career. You can imagine that a lot of these guys, when they’re struggling, they don’t have anywhere else to turn, so they turn to us. We’re just trying to build as many resources as we can. So we connect them with rehab clinics, psychologists, and other therapists who are willing to give their professional services free of charge to fighters. Thankfully we’ve had a lot of fighters take advantage of that, and I’ve seen some really great success stories through that. 

Another thing that we do is we team up with some of the people that are doing cutting edge research on brain health issues. At the Cleveland Clinic, Dr Burnick has probably studied more fighters brains than anybody else. There are, also, some folks out at UCLA that are doing good work, and we connect fighters with the researchers, because these researchers need fighters to volunteer. They need to participate in these studies so they could better understand their brains. This is the only hope we have for a cure. CTE can’t get diagnosed in the living you have to die. Then the brain gets removed from the skull. They slice it up and they put it under a microscope, and they have to look for these signature proteins that build up in a certain way. Unless fighters donate their brains, they will not be diagnosed, and the picture remains incomplete. And not everybody wants to donate their brain, but we’ve had many, many fighters donate their brains, and so that’s a wonderful thing. That gives back to the scientific community, and that community gives back to the fighters. Those are the broad strokes of our foundations work – what we’re hoping to achieve.

Rowan: Yeah, there you go. So kind of three prong approach: educational, treatment, and research. The difficulty with taking repeated flows to the head is that is gets harder and harder to retain that type of information. Fortunately, a lot of these guys have teams to…

LOST AUDIO 

Erik: Yeah, Rowan, I’m sorry your feed was cutting out a little bit. I didn’t hear quite everything that you had to say. But was, was there a question there at the end, or did you just finish telling me about the marathon and the work that you’re doing?

Rowan: Gotcha, yes. The question is, what can Canadian Mental Health Association and others do, what can they do now to help fighters improve their mental health situation?

Erik: Yes, so I think, I think the theme is education, just continued education. One of the really cruel things about CTE is, right now, it’s it’s not curable. So first off if you get the disease, you don’t even know that you have it when you’re alive. All a doctor can do is tell you they suspect that you have it, but they can’t prove it. Assuming you have it, the cruel thing is, there’s no cure for it. It’s a pretty scary thing for fighters to think – that they’re living with CTE.

I think there’s a great value in continued education for the community, because some people will make better choices, and then some of those people who would have gotten CTE aren’t going to get CTE. I think that continued drum beat of education, of talking about it, being honest about what causes CTE. It’s not my job to tell people how to live their lives, but to get the right information so nybody who’s involved in the space can make more informed choices. If they can just share the right information with athletes they could prevent a lot of suffering.

Education goes a long way, maybe not today, but over 10 or 20 or 30 years. I’d like to see everybody continue to educate, or start educating it if they’re not. If you’re organizing combat sports or collision sports, like football or hockey the organizers should be obligated to inform their athletes. Like in hockey, Gary Bettman still pretends that CTE isn’t caused from all the checking and fighting in hockey even though all sorts of NHL athletes have been discovered to have had it. I want to see people involved in these contact sports be more honest with their athletes, and that’ll be one large step in a better direction for the improvement of sport.

Rowan: It sounds like you’re not trying to stop the physicality just that you want more awareness and more education. 

Thanks for enlightening us today, Erik. Really awesome conversation. I learned a lot, and hopefully we can work out the technical issues and post part of this interview onto our other respective feeds. Yeah, thanks again for coming on. Talk soon.

Erik : I appreciate it. Thanks. Rowan. Sure. Thanks everyone.

Learn More:

Combat Sports Law → www.combatsportslaw.com Fighting Foundation → www.fightingfoundation.org