Treatment & Training
COUNSELING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
Psychological treatment helps you to understand yourself and your concerns more clearly. Such knowledge and self-awareness can build the foundation for better adjustment and personal change. Sometimes when a person is facing difficulties, supportive therapy from a psychologist can be a great help. At other times, it can be useful to draw into focus the abilities and resources you may already have, and begin to use them in new and creative ways. In still other circumstances, the best thing is to learn new skills so you can move forward with more freedom. The process also involves defining goals you are hoping to reach, and keeping track of your progress along the way. Results you may discover are that you can more willingly experience life and yourself with spontaneity, and act in ways that have value and meaning.
BRAIN INJURY REHABILITATION
The rehabilitation process is different for everyone. Rehabilitation programs should be individualized, fitting each person's unique needs. Just as no two people are exactly alike, no two brain injuries are exactly alike. The person with a brain injury and his or her family should always be the most important members of the treatment team. Cultural, religious, social and economic backgrounds must always be taken into consideration when planning a person's rehabilitation program. The goal of rehabilitation is to help people regain the most independent level of functioning possible. Rehabilitation channels the body's natural healing abilities and the brain's relearning processes so an individual may recover as quickly and efficiently as possible. Rehabilitation also involves learning new ways to compensate for abilities that may have changed considerably due to brain injury. There is much that is still unknown about the brain and brain injury rehabilitation. Treatment methods and technology are rapidly advancing as knowledge of the brain and its function increase. (Brain Injury Association of America)
Psychological services can be a valuable addition to the rehabilitation team. Contributions may be in areas of neuropsychological assessment, individual and family counseling, cognitive retraining, and staff training.
HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY AND BIOFEEDBACK
Health psychology applies psychological knowledge, assessments, and interventions to help people understand and manage things about themselves or their situation that affect their physical health. This can also involve dealing with emotional and interpersonal reactions to health problems.
If you have ever taken your temperature or stepped on a scale to see how much you weigh, you have used biofeedback. The temperature and weight readings from these devices give "feedback" or information about your body to tell you whether you have a fever or have lost weight. This information helps you make decisions about what to do next. In a similar way, biofeedback therapists use specialized equipment to train clients how to improve their health by using signals from their own bodies. Biofeedback is a comfortable and noninvasive form of training. The therapist attaches sensors or electrodes to the body and these sensors provide a variety of readings-feedback-that are presented by the equipment for the client to see, hear, or feel. The signals typically measure skin temperature, muscle tension, breathing, heart rate, perspiration on skin, and/or brainwave activity. With this information, you learn to make changes so subtle that at first they cannot be consciously perceived. With practice, however, the new responses and behaviors help to bring relief and improvement to a variety of disorders. (Adapted from the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America)
NEUROFEEDBACK (Neurobiofeedback)
Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback training that uses your EEG (electroencephalogram), also known as "brain waves," as the signal that controls the computer feedback. Sensors are applied noninvasively and painlessly to the surface of your scalp to detect your brain waves, which are then amplified and filtered. The EEG signals from your brain are transformed and analyzed by a computer, which then automatically gives you feedback when your brainwaves are in the right zone. Neurofeedback does not send any electrical signals to you, but just gives you and your brain information that helps you to learn and your brain to make adjustments. The feedback is typically a combination of sounds or music the computer plays, and points, graphs, or pictures that are shown on the computer monitor, in a way that is similar to what happens with a computer game. This rapid and precise feedback provides the brain with information that helps your brain to shape its activity to become more and more close to the conditions that are defined for training. The training conditions are chosen because they relate to useful goals you have picked and are aiming for in thinking, emotion, behavior, and self-regulation (after Dr. Tom Collura, 2007). Find out more ยป