This is a part of podcast series from the Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center discussing emotional challenges after a traumatic burn injury (TBI). In this segment, Dr. Sougandhi discusses the impact of emotional challenges after TBI. 

Involvement of family members within the treatment setting for a person that has an injury is, I believe critically important for the person with the injury to have a successful outcome. And by outcome, all I'm saying is whatever that person defines outcome as, right? And maybe it's just satisfaction with their life, contentment, getting back to work, whatever that might be. I never want to family member to be a therapist. They should be a family member. But we're also just trying to help to educate them too, so that they know what strategies they're learning and then they can help them implement those strategies at home and they can remind them of those strategies. And I think when we teach the family member also to do that in a constructive way, not a critical way, then it's more likely to be helpful, it'll be more likely to work.  

So one of the reasons why it's important to include family members is because we want to generalize these strategies. We want to help them implement it and make it habits at home. What I focused on right there was helping the person with the injury, but now it's also important to help the family member. It's important to help the family member adjust to this. The reason for that is because there's a lot of research that's been done on long-term effects in family members, and turns out that there's a significant percentage of family members that end up actually developing psychological problems. So even if they never had an issue before, those individuals will oftentimes have problems with severe depression, severe anxiety disorders, even forms of post-traumatic stress disorder, even aspects of that. And they can have those for years, even after the person with the injury has seemingly gone on to get into their life and get back to their life.  

And so what happens is that now if those critical family members in that support system start suffering and they develop these clinical conditions that make them dysfunctional, right, they're so depressed that they start missing work, that they start not being engaged in family activities, then that directly influences that relationship. So now you have two people in the relationship with a lot of emotional dysregulation and nobody's responding to the other person. They're both reacting to each other. So that research shows that when that happens, that actually is likely to decrease the possibility of the person with injury getting back to work and being productive, that they're likely to exacerbate their own emotional issues. So whatever problems, long-term problems, a person with TBI can have, when the family member is significantly distressed because of these issues, that it will actually worsen their outcome overall. So that's why it's important to pay attention to what's happening in the family and help them with this. 

Visit https://msktc.org/tbi and get the answers you need from experts who conduct innovative and high-quality research, provide patient care, and work to improve the health and overall quality of life for people with traumatic brain injury. That’s https://msktc.org/tbi.