Understanding: The Experience of a Brain Injury

This article is written from my Clinical Research Project: “Listening to the Brain/Recovering the Brain/Mind.” The goal of this project is to better understand the process and treatment of healing damage to the brain/mind. This is not an easy task and requires a lot of commitment from both the clinician and the patient. In this article I explore, through a case study, one of the main obstacles to healing damage to the brain/mind: how stress and even simple demands on the brain/ mind for action drive the brain injury to worse places. The article follows the journey of one patient (Ms. S) as she strives to work on how stressful situations and demands on her brain for routine life actions rapidly drain her energy. The article also explores the details of how mitochondria in the nerve cells (those little energy factories) are a major factor in secondary damage from brain trauma, including TBI, strokes, seizures, infections in the brain, brain illnesses and diseases, major mental illness, and PTSD. And how patients can deal with their chronic fatigue as a result of damage to mitochondrial functioning. A major factor in the recovery of brain trauma is how rapidly stressful situations and even simple demands on the brain for work and action lead to chronic fatigue due to mitochondrial dysfunction. The article concludes with a protocol for the treatment of damage to the brain/mind that addresses mitochondrial dysfunction.