Neuropsychological Rehabilitation for People with Non-Progressive Brain Damage

Abstract

Neuropsychological rehabilitation (NR) is concerned with the amelioration of deficits caused by insult to the brain. It adopts a goal-planning approach and addresses real-life difficulties. Neuropsychology studies how the brain affects behavior, emotion, and cognition. Rehabilitation is a process whereby people who are disabled work together with professional staff, relatives, and others to achieve optimum physical, psychological, and vocational well-being. Rehabilitation is not synonymous with recovery, nor is it treatment. It is a two-way interactive process with professional staff and others who aim to remediate or alleviate difficulties, adopting a holistic approach in which cognition, emotion, and psychosocial problems are treated together, aided by an increasing use of technological aids. NR enables people with disabilities to achieve their optimum level of well-being, reduce problems in everyday life, and help them return to the most appropriate environments. There may also be some partial or limited recovery of function and certainly some substitution of function. Accepting that return of normal functioning is highly unlikely, rehabilitation finds ways to help people learn more efficiently, compensate for their difficulties, and, when necessary, modify the environment. While theoretical models have proved helpful, indeed essential, in identifying cognitive strengths and weaknesses, in explaining phenomena, and in making predictions about behavior, they are insufficient, on their own, to seriously influence rehabilitation aimed at making lives more adaptable to problems encountered in everyday living. NR should focus on goals relevant to a person’s individual everyday life, it should be implemented in the environment where the person lives, and have personally meaningful themes, activities, settings, and interactions. We know from numerous studies that NR can be clinically effective. Although rehabilitation can be expensive in the short term, there is evidence that it is cost-effective in the long term.