Psychology Today - Fatigue and Brain Injury
- ‘I’m So Over It!’: Brain Injury Provides Insight Into COVID Fatigue
- Fatigue: Does It Ever Go Away?
- Pandemic Stages Are Like Brain Injury Stages
- Is Mental Work the Same as Exercise?
The longer this pandemic grinds on, the more similarities I see with how my brain injury recovery went. It’s so sad that physicians and rehabilitation haven’t innovated in the last two decades to change those stages.
I wrote my latest post for Psychology Today on this topic, on how a concussion, or COVID-19, devastates us when we learn it has a vastly different progression than acute illness. I’m hoping that understanding the stages of brain injury recovery helps my readers cope with the pandemic.
“I got this,” I thought when facing recovery from brain injury. In Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me, I called this first stage the Honeymoon.
Acute illness, the kind we’re all familiar with, tends to have a four-stage, upward progression: Get ill. Get diagnosed. Be given treatment. Be fully healed. Perhaps that’s why a concussion or a novel viral disease like COVID-19 devastates us when we learn it has a horribly different progression. Brain injury recovery gives us a context for the pandemic stages we’re in.
