Emotional and Behavioral Problems
TBI may cause emotional or behavioral problems and changes in personality. Emotional symptoms that can follow TBI include emotional instability, depression, anxiety, hypomania, mania, apathy, irritability, and anger. TBI appears to predispose a person to psychiatric disorders including obsessive compulsive disorder, alcohol or substance abuse or substance dependence, dysthymia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, phobias, panic disorder, and schizophrenia. About one quarter of people with TBI suffer from clinical depression, and about 9% suffer mania. The prevalence of all psychiatric illnesses is 49% in moderate to severe TBI and 34% in mild TBI within a year of injury, compared with 18% of controls. People with TBI continue to be at greater risk for psychiatric problems than others even years after an injury. Problems that may persist for up to two years after the injury include irritability, suicidal ideation, insomnia, and loss of the ability to experience pleasure from previously enjoyable experiences.
Behavioral symptoms that can follow TBI include disinhibition, inability to control anger, impulsiveness, lack of initiative, inappropriate sexual activity, and changes in personality. Different behavioral problems are characteristic of the location of injury; for instance, frontal lobe injuries often result in disinhibition and inappropriate or childish behavior, and temporal lobe injuries often cause irritability and aggression.
Read more about this topic: Complications Of Traumatic Brain Injury
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