Mood Issues that are Suffered after Brain Injury

Mood Issues

We don’t need to define mood issues that occur after brain injury.  It speaks for itself.  One of the most common symptoms of brain injury is mood and anxiety issues after someone suffers a traumatic brain injury.  Even if the survivor was a docile person before the injury it is very common for that part of their personality to change.  Several things can attribute to this symptom.  Frustration because of other deficits attributed to the brain injury can cause anxiety and anger.

Examples of Mood Issues

The best way to explain the mood issues that survivors encounter is to hear directly from the survivors themselves. To do this we will use our TBI Voices project.  Our first example comes from our interview with Elizabeth.  Elizabeth worked at a cheese factory and one morning when she got to work the floor was very slippery and she slipped and fell hitting her head three time on machinery on the way down.  The fall caused her to suffer a severe brain injury in which caused Elizabeth to be comatose .  She also suffered a second TBI approximately three years later.  The recovery from the second left her with far more deficits than the first even though it was not as severe.  Her husband explains some of the mood issues that Elizabeth has stemming from her brain injury. In his own words; ““She’s not the same woman I married. She gets frustrated real easy. She doesn’t understand a lot of basic everyday things that people take for granted, you know, just how to cook a meal or to follow instructions. She’ll have to look at it continuously instead of just reading and doing it, and helping her control her emotions. Basically she gets, like I said, frustrated.” Elizabeth agrees with her husband’s assessment.  She states; ‘“If somebody said something I could take it the wrong way and not understand it the right way, and so for no reason I’d snap. I guess snap’s a good word. Kind of yell, scared, afraid, so I’d kind of take everything out that way.” To read Elizabeth’s entire story click here.

Our next example of mood issues comes from our interview with Kelly.  Kelly suffered a traumatic brain injury when she was trying to bridle an unbroken horse.  The details surrounding the accident are sketchy as there were no actual witnesses to the accident.  There is nothing else to go on except Kelly’s account of the accident and sometimes because of brain injury memories are not always exactly the facts.  She was experiencing a lot of mood issues.  She was depressed and her caregivers expressed that she was in either a flat or bad mood most of the time.  Kelly was depressed not only because she lost the use of her hand but there were a lot of other emotional things going on.  She blamed it on hormones which take the rap a lot of times for one to act our of character.  They did try some hormone replacement therapy with Kelly and it did seem to help some of her mood issues. to read Kelly’s entire story click here.

Mood issues is one of those deficits that is mentioned often in our pages of Brain Injury Help.  Sometimes anti-depressants are administered to the survivors and on a case to case basis may help considerably.  Psychiatric therapy can also be very helpful to the survivor to deal with the deficits that they have incurred.

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Gordon Johnson

Attorney Gordon Johnson is one of the nations leading brain injury advocates. He is Past-Chair of the TBILG, a national group of more than 150 brain injury advocates. He has spoken at numerous brain injury seminars and is the author of some of the most read brain injury web pages on the internet.

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