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“They brought you back to the fact you’re not the same”: Sense of self after traumatic brain injury

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In the quest for scientific understanding, we end up magnifying patients’ deficits until deficits are all we see. The actual person fades away.

(Kean 2014, pSR8).

Abstract

This paper considers contexts following traumatic brain injury, exploring what may be at stake when dominant expectations predict a ‘lost’ or ‘broken’ self. I explore stories co-constructed with one young man and his mother to illustrate their personal and intersubjective understandings of identity, at times conflicting, within family interactions and when encountering normative practices of neurorehabilitation clinicians. The power relations portrayed confront this man’s narrative attempts to align his present and pre-injury self, including standard assessments delineating change, administered by healthcare professionals. I consider a need for greater attention to interaction-generated disruption to sense of self, within contemporary conceptualisations of ‘person-centred care’.

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Notes

  1. Ethical approval to conduct this research was granted by the National Research Ethics Service (NRES) Committee—London City & East (REC reference: 15/LO/0525). Pseudonyms are used and personal identifiers have been replaced to render participants non-recognisable, without alteration of original meanings within the accounts (Kaiser 2009).

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the participants for sharing their stories and Damien Ridge for his guidance in this research, including comments on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editor for reading the paper critically and offering constructive comments for its development. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present an early version of this paper at the ‘Broken Narratives and the Lived Body' conference at the Monash University Prato Centre, Italy, 18-20 April 2016.

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Correspondence to Petra Mäkelä.

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Mäkelä, P. “They brought you back to the fact you’re not the same”: Sense of self after traumatic brain injury. Subjectivity 10, 358–373 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0036-8

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