The Neurofeedback Solution: How to Treat Autism, ADHD, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Stroke, PTSD, and More by Stephen Larsen Ph.d

Author:Stephen Larsen Ph.d.
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Health/Wellness
ISBN: 1594773661
Publisher: Healing Arts Press
Published: 2012-03-25T21:00:00+00:00

TEN

TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY

With Harris McCarter, Ph.D., Michelle Luster, Mary Lee Esty, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., and D. Corydon Hammond, Ph.D., ECNS, QEEG, BCIA-EEG

Head Injuries from the Mild to the Severe

In this chapter we consider head injuries from the mild to the severe, but you will learn from the cases presented herein just how severe “mild” can feel to the sufferer. The human brain is not only the most complex entity in the known universe, it is also the most exquisitely intricate in organization. To develop this organization includes all of those maturational processes we discussed in chapter 5, where we looked at how easy it is for them to run awry without proper environmental response and nurturance. In chapter 6 on autism, we looked at how subtle disruptions, from sources unknown, whether genetic or chemotoxic, prevent the personality from maturing normally. How easily disrupted are those delicate mechanisms that are built, one on another, to allow us to enjoy the full complexity that is human—even when we have no obvious cause of the disruptive agency. Attentional mechanisms, perhaps milder in their impairments, still disrupt lives (chapter 7) and our ability to cope effectively.

In traumatic brain injury (TBI), we have a brain that is mostly “working okay” until the auto accident, the fall on the ice, the blast explosion, or, more insidiously, the toxic exposure. As we will see in some of the accounts that follow, life must always be reckoned again, from that point onward. In our first story, when the TBI happens in childhood, the damage may include those developmental aspects already mentioned. Our first narrative also shows how such problems may blight or alter an entire lifetime, until they are addressed. Because sports injuries have such currency these days, an entire separate chapter is devoted to these (chapter 11).

The sequelae of TBI, child or adult, may include difficulty with organization, time management, sleep, mood instabilities, energy, planning, pain, and headaches, shading into chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. Also, things we don’t normally think of as connected to head injury, such as digestion, immune functioning, endocrine regulation, and even sexuality, may be affected. People lead a compromised existence some describe as “a gray room” where all is “cloudy and confused,” as one of our clients described the post-TBI state. People then may lead lives of quiet desperation until help arrives—or never arrives. Worst of all, they are accused by employers, or managed health care, or no-fault insurance, or even their doctors, of malingering or making it up. Yes, it is “all in your head,” as the callous dismissal goes; it may indeed be “in your head,” but it is not the outcome of a bad attitude. It is because an extremely delicate, intricate neurological environment has been disturbed, and it runs too fast or too slow, it fails to talk to its other parts, or all the neuronal voices babble at once.

It is not that health care providers are uncaring—it’s just that they may not know what to do. As discussed in

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