Brain Injury and Personality Change

April 27, 2018, Kitchener, Ontario

Posted by: Robert Deutschmann, Personal Injury Lawyer

Brain Injury Can Change Your Personality

Traumatic brain injury or concussion are both considered to be forms of brain damage and have many long and short-term impacts on the patient.  We all know about the headaches and sensitivity to light and sound that can occur, but many people are less aware of the fact that brain injury can result in changes in personality. The changes can be sublet of severe and can be permanent.

We are defined by our personality – people are drawn to certain traits like kindness, humour, empathy in other individuals. Traits such as hostility and selfishness are not generally seen to be attractive. Deeper in our personalities are higher order personality traits such as our social ability, moral reasoning, and our ability to mange our emotion and behavior.

Brain injury can dramatically alter all of personality traits. Combined with other impacts of brain damage like cognitive decline, the result can be extremely difficult for family and friends to accept and manage. To outsiders there is often no outward sign of brain injury, and an injured person’s reactions to any given situation can be confusing. The cause of the personality change is understood to be damage in the prefrontal cortex. Damage of that brain area can result in:

• Difficulty regulating emotion
• Difficulty managing behavior
• Disinhibition
• Psychopathy
• Criminal behavior
• Poor impulse control

The result of brain damage is that individuals often become socially isolated, intensifying the underlying problem. This leads to depression and anxiety. The negative impacts of poor emotional adjustment is now recognized to have an enormous detrimental impact on quality of life of the injured person and their caregivers and loved ones.

New techniques for treating and helping manage the changes are being developed. They include croup therapy which is focussed on emotion regulation giving patients strategies that they can use to self manage their emotions and resulting actions. Early results are promising. The treatment protocol is being pioneered at the BISEP (Brain Injury Solutions And Emotions Programme).

You can read more about the treatment protocols here.

About Deutschmann Law

Deutschmann Law serves South-Western Ontario with offices in Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Woodstock, Brantford, Stratford and Ayr. The law practice of Robert Deutschmann focuses almost exclusively in personal injury and disability insurance matters. For more information, please visit www.deutschmannlaw.com or call us at 1-519-742-7774.

It is important that you review your accident benefit file with one of our experienced personal injury / car accident lawyers to ensure that you obtain access to all your benefits which include, but are limited to, things like physiotherapy, income replacement benefits, vocational retraining and home modifications.