Chris Nowitsky raised an excellent point in the Times. To excerpt:

But Christopher Nowinski, a former professional wrestler who worked with Mr. Benoit, and who was forced to quit because of head injuries, said he believed that repeated, untreated concussions might have caused his friend to snap.

“He was one of the only guys who would take a chair shot to the back of the head,” Mr. Nowinski said, “which is stupid.”

Mr. Nowinski has written a book called “Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis” (Drummond Publishing Group, 2006), about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that can cause memory loss, depression and “bizarre, paranoid behavior.”

Mr. Nowinski said that he had been trying to persuade the coroner examining Mr. Benoit to allow a brain exam to look for the telltale neurofibrillary tangles in the brain’s cortex, but that he had thus far been rebuffed.

“Part of me hopes there was something wrong with his brain,” Mr. Nowinski said. “The Chris Benoit I knew was always more concerned about everybody else’s well-being than his own.”


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Add on that one of Benoit's signatures was diving head first onto someone from the turnbuckle, and that's a recipe for head trauma probably 50 times what Andre Waters had at the time of his passing.

This, by the way, does not absolve Benoit of any guilt. But it's more than just the drugs, Shell.