Useful information and real hope for patients and families whose lives have been altered by traumatic brain injury. A traumatic brain injury is a life-changing event, affecting an individual’s lifestyle, ability to work, relationships—even personality. Whatever caused it—car crash, work accident, sports injury, domestic violence, combat—a severe blow to the head results in acute and, often, lasting symptoms. People with brain injury benefit from understanding, patience, and assistance in recovering their bearings and functioning to their full abilities. In The Traumatized Brain, neuropsychiatrists Drs. Vani Rao and Sandeep Vaishnavi—experts in helping people heal after head trauma—explain how traumatic brain injury, whether mild, moderate, or severe, affects the brain. They advise readers on how emotional symptoms such as depression, anxiety, mania, and apathy can be treated; how behavioral symptoms such as psychosis, aggression, impulsivity, and sleep disturbances can be addressed; and how cognitive functions like attention, memory, executive functioning, and language can be improved. They also discuss headaches, seizures, vision problems, and other neurological symptoms of traumatic brain injury. By stressing that symptoms are real and are directly related to the trauma, Rao and Vaishnavi hope to restore dignity to people with traumatic brain injury and encourage them to ask for help. Each chapter incorporates case studies and suggestions for appropriate medications, counseling, and other treatments and ends with targeted tips for coping. The book also includes a useful glossary, a list of resources, and suggestions for further reading.

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

Traumatic Experience and the Brain is the result of Dr. Dave Ziegler's three decades of experience with children traumatized by abuse and/or neglect. Containing almost 100 pages of new material, this newly revised and updated second edition details the effect of trauma on the developing brain, describing how it actually rewires one's perceptions of self, others, and the world. It is a book of hope for foster, natural, and adoptive parents of such "broken" children and the therapists, teachers and social workers who attempt to help them. Dave Ziegler, M.S., Ph.D., is the director of Jasper Mountain, a residential treatment program in Oregon for some of society's most damaged children.

Explore interventions and treatment methods designed to help curb the alarming trend toward violence in today's youth! Written in jargon-free lucid prose, Psychological Trauma and the Developing Brain: Neurologically Based Interventions for Troubled Children specifically shows how positive early experiences enhance brain development and how traumatic life experiences, especially child abuse and neglect, can affect a child's brain and behavior. Through carefully selected case studies, the book offers basic principles of treatment and a broad range of interventions that target the multiple symptoms and problems seen in children with a history of childhood trauma. Offering a new psychobiological model of child development, this book incorporates the influence of both genes and the environment and conceptualizes normal and pathological development in terms of common underlying processes. For readers concerned with promoting healthy development in children and helping children recover from childhood trauma, this engagingly written book describes exactly how a child's social/interpersonal environment can positively or negatively influence brain development. Throughout the book, the authors highlight the interrelationship between neurobiology and psychology. They present basic information about brain development and organization, describe exactly what is going on inside the brain at each stage of development, and illustrate these concepts through a detailed case study of a preschooler with severe problems in communicating and relating. They discuss the pernicious effects that traumatic stress has on brain and behavior, differentiating between simple and complex PTSD, and review the specific brain impairments currently attributed to a childhood history of maltreatment. Using their unique psychobiological perspective and illustrative case studies, the authors evaluate the principles and strategies of treatment, showing how relationships and experiences can mitigate the effects childhood trauma. After fleshing out the shocking cost to society of child maltreatment, the authors offer broad policy prescriptions that promote healthy development, including basic strategies for prevention and early intervention. Psychological Trauma and the Developing Brain: Neurologically Based Interventions for Troubled Children will show you: how interpersonal experience shapes brain development what is going on in the brain during the critical first six years how therapeutic relationships and interpersonal experience can promote emotional and cognitive development how childhood maltreatment can damage the brain and impair the developing mind what types of experiences and therapeutic strategies can mitigate the effects of childhood trauma what policy prescriptions, programs, and early intervention strategies can be implemented to promote healthy development

This is a comprehensive, must-have reference that provides parents with the support and information they need to help their child recover from a closed-head injury and prevent further incidents. Coping with traumatic brain injury (TBI) involves a complex process of readjustment to the changes in a once healthy child and affects everyone in the family. Traumatic brain injury occurs when the brain abruptly and violently moves within the skull as a result of extreme force to the head during an automobile, biking, or playground accident, for example. The effects of TBI can range from mild to severe and recovery can take from weeks to years. Although each child's condition is unique, all TBI patients experience impairment in one or more of the following areas: cognition; emotion/behaviour; and motor skills. While TBI can happen to anyone, children, particularly teens, are susceptible. And, children who have already had one TBI are at greatest risk. Written by a team of medical specialists, therapists, educators, and an attorney, the book covers: what is traumatic brain injury?; medical concerns; rehabilitation and treatments; coping and adjustment; effects on learning and thinking, speech and language, and behaviour; educational needs; and legal issues. Throughout the book, a case study of a boy who was injured at age eight, illustrates the effects of TBI on education, socialisation and independence. Parent statements at the end of each chapter attest to the variety of response families have, and offer insight about the experience of raising a child with TBI. A resource guide of support and advocacy organisations, a reading list, and glossary round out this authoritative guide. This book is useful to professionals who provide services to children with TBI and their families. General and special educators will find it essential reading to help their students with TBI. But most of all, the book gives parents the hope and facts they need to improve the outcome of their child's recovery.

In order to reduce the number of deaths from severe head injuries, systematic management is essential. This book is a practical, comprehensive guide to the treatment of patients (both adults and children) with such injuries, from the time of initial contact through to the rehabilitation center. Sections are devoted to prehospital treatment, admission and diagnostics, acute management, and neurointensive care and rehabilitation. Evidence-based recommendations are presented for each diagnostic and therapeutic measure, and tips, tricks, and pitfalls are highlighted. Throughout, the emphasis is on the provision of sound clinical advice that will maximize the likelihood of an optimal outcome. Helpful flowcharts designed for use in daily routine are also provided. The authors are all members of the Scandinavian Neurotrauma Committee and have extensive practical experience in the areas they write about.

Make the fullest possible recovery after neurological injury with this definitive guide—by a doctor and spinal cord injury survivor who’s been there After an accident that left him permanently paralyzed over ten years ago, Dr. Bradford Berk made it his mission to help others recover from acute neurological injury (ANI). As the founder and director of the University of Rochester Neurorestoration Institute, he brings his abundant experience in working with patients and making his own ongoing recovery to Getting Your Brain and Body Back, the most up-to-date guide for survivors of spinal cord injury (SCI), stroke, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Each of these acute neurological injuries can result in similar physical and psychological challenges and require similar treatments, medications, and assistive devices. Getting Your Brain and Body Back offers comprehensive, reassuring guidance for your every concern: How to deal with grief and trauma in the aftermath of accident or injury—and build resilience as you find your way forward What adaptive devices—for bathing, dining, mobility, and more—will help you enjoy life to the utmost How to prevent and treat secondary health problems of every kind, such as heart, skin, and bladder troubles—sexual health included! Therapeutic approaches from both Western and Eastern medicine to consider for maximum healing and pain relief Dr. Berk’s candid advice on medical treatment and daily living—plus insights from the brightest minds in the field—will help get you or your loved one back to life.

Your program for regianing cognitive function & overcoming emotional pain.

"A collection of short stories originally published in The Huffington Post."

Designed for psychotherapists and their clients, Peter Levine's latest best-seller continues his groundbreaking exploration of the central role of the body in processing—and healing—trauma. With foreword by Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score In Trauma and Memory, bestselling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Building on his 45 years of successful treatment of trauma and utilizing case studies from his own practice, Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps. While acknowledging that memory can be trusted, he argues that the only truly useful memories are those that might initially seem to be the least reliable: memories stored in the body and not necessarily accessible by our conscious mind. While much work has been done in the field of trauma studies to address "explicit" traumatic memories in the brain (such as intrusive thoughts or flashbacks), much less attention has been paid to how the body itself stores "implicit" memory, and how much of what we think of as "memory" actually comes to us through our (often unconsciously accessed) felt sense. By learning how to better understand this complex interplay of past and present, brain and body, we can adjust our relationship to past trauma and move into a more balanced, relaxed state of being. Written for trauma sufferers as well as mental health care practitioners, Trauma and Memory is a groundbreaking look at how memory is constructed and how influential memories are on our present state of being.