Brain injury survivors: Effects of targeted family counseling.

The incidence and prevalence of brain injury are on the rise, posing increasingly serious public health and economic threats. Often, brain injury leads to chronic physical and psychological challenges that require survivors and their families to adapt, to minimize disruption of their family relationships, social networks and quality of life. Counseling can help families adapt. This study used counseling intended to optimize family relational patterns, especially patterns that may affect survivors\u27 adaptive social behavior. The method lent itself to a pre-post design that used two sets of standardized measures, and treated each family separately using eight, one-hour counseling sessions. The sessions followed a standardized format of process and content. Quantitative and qualitative results of the six families were presented using pre to post comparisons illustrated by line graphs, family-by-family case reviews, and between family data summaries. On average, there were not clinically significant improvements in parents\u27 parent-child relational behavior, or in their survivor\u27s adaptive social behavior from pre to post. However, the counseling appeared to be associated with clinically significant increases in specific skills among some parents and survivors