Transcript:
So I want to do a video on personality changes resulting from a traumatic brain injury. This is really important because people see the same person. And sometimes the person has changed a little bit. Their brain isn’t quite wired the same way. And so sometimes they will have personality changes. Somebody will sometimes go from being really shy to very outgoing. We had a client that his ideal night was to read a book and be inside and didn’t want to go out at all. After his traumatic brain injury, he wanted to consistently have people over for dinner. He wanted to be going downtown. He wanted to be out. He went from an introvert to an extrovert. And let’s just say that was a difficult adjustment for his wife to deal with. She had to learn some new skills that her husband, all of a sudden was a different person. It’s a personality change. It is a common occurrence after a traumatic brain injury. And they can be as extreme as I just mentioned. We had a client that had that, or it could be something much more simple.
Sometimes it’s something what’s known as short fuse syndrome, where basically something happens, you drop something on the floor. All of a sudden they’re enraged angry. And it’s just so out of proportion that it doesn’t seem in character. That’s something that’s fairly common after a brain injury, is their emotional response to stimulus is so different that you feel like they’re not the same person. And now a lot of the times that will get better and it can get better with rehabilitation or certain types of experts that can be used. But what really needs to be addressed is these things are not the fault of the person who’s changed. This is not their fault. It isn’t like they’re deliberately or intentionally trying to change. It’s just the way their brain is wired is a little different now. And so it’s something that needs to be taken into consideration.
Sometimes we actually even advise some type of marital therapy or couples therapy for the spouse of the injured brain victim, or if it’s a child or a teenager or something, sometimes we advise some therapy for the parents and the family of the person who suffered the injury outside and away from the victim, just because they’re grappling with this new person that they aren’t really familiar of how to deal with it. And so that’s something that I just want to address is the personality changes are not the fault of the victim who suffered the brain injury, but they need to be addressed in a way that everyone feels safe and they can figure out a way to move on and try and provide the safety net that they need over their life.
