Personal Injury Law

Loss of Identity After a Brain Injury

By Bruce Stern

I read an interesting article on The New York Time's website last week which discusses a rarely seen but yet devastating side effect of brain injuries: patients who  become profoundly suspicious of their closest relationships, often cutting themselves off from those who love them and care for them. They may insist that their spouse is an impostor; that their grown children are body doubles; that a caregiver, a close friend, even their entire family is fake, a duplicate version. Doctors believe these delusions are symptoms of schizophrenia, however recently, researchers have found similar delusions in hundreds of people who are not schizophrenic but have neurological problems including dementia, brain surgery and traumatic blows to the head.

Now a small group of scientists are researching what makes a person's identity in their brain. Learning what makes identity, researchers say, will help doctors understand how some people preserve their identities in the face of creeping dementia, and how others are sometimes able to reconstitute one.

You can read the full article online here.

Full post as published by Traumatic Brain Injury Law Blog on August 21, 2009 (boomark / email).