Lipmans’ call for concussion awareness
Janette Lipman opens up to Peninsula Living about her experiences with son and retired rugby union player, Michael Lipman, which are helping change the landscape for the physical and mental health of professional athletes.
Janette Lipman is a retired nurse and mother to one of the most famous ex-professional rugby athletes in the world.
Michael Lipman played more than 200 matches and suffered over 30 concussions over his career, leading to a diagnosis of early-onset dementia.
Janette says despite working in the health sector, she was unaware of the repercussions and risks of playing a high-contact sport on the brain because research in that area hadn’t ‘come to focus’.
“My family is incredibly sporty, and we come from a long line of really high-achieving sports people in quite a few disciplines,” she explains.
She says while Michael and his brother suffered a few minor injuries while playing rugby at St Joseph’s College Hunters Hill, a concussion was not something that was ‘obvious’.
“It’s like a mental health thing where there’s no bandage on the head, so you don’t actually think that it’s an injury,” Janette says.
“It wasn’t until a few years later when I was quite friendly with one of the neurosurgeons at Royal North Shore Hospital, where I was working – who actually wrote a concussion protocol that Joeys started to follow – that I realised there could be an issue.”
The neurosurgeon’s advice was that athletes impacted by concussion should be taken off the field and cannot play again for at least three weeks, but Janette says there was ‘no discussion or realisation’ that there might be long-term effects.
“My family is incredibly sporty, and we come from a long line of really high-achieving sports people in quite a few disciplines”
Fast forward to Michaels’s professional career playing for the England Rugby Union team, and Janette says there still wasn’t enough information about the long-term effects.
She recalls that once she had a phone call from Michal who said a doctor wanted to put him on a medication that would help him feel better after suffering a concussion.
As a nurse, she realised the medication was used to treat depression, so asked Michael if he was depressed.
“He said, ‘No, I’m not depressed but there’s a couple of other rugby players who are taking it and they feel better after their concussions. So, they think that I’ll feel better if I take this medication and I’ll be able to play.’”
“Absolutely horrified. I said, ‘You’re not taking the medication, because it’s a medication that is only used for people with severe depression.’”
She says professional athletes are under pressure to get back to playing as soon as possible as it is their job, but their health needs to be a priority too.
Seeing her son start suffering the symptoms of early-onset dementia has been ‘devastating’ for the local.
“You’ve got a 40-year-old son who has gone from the pinnacle of an international career to not being able to hold a job down in the space of a couple of years,” Janette says.
“The doctors have to change their tune. They have to be responsive to the science behind the research and they have to apply proper protocols.”
Michael recently released a book called Concussion, which details his family’s story of how the long-term impact of sport-related concussions changed their lives forever.
“If he can change even one person’s life by them listening to what he said, then that’s a win,” says Janette.
To find out more information or purchase Michaels’s book, head online to Amazon or Booktopia, or visit your nearest bookstore.