Brain Injury and Gender Role Strain: Rebuilding Adult Lifestyles After Injury

Discover new interventions to restore self-respect and personal life control! When men suffer traumatic brain injury (TBI), they can lose their sense of competence, confidence, and masculinity, resulting in a gender role strain. Brain Injury and Gender Role Strain offers an innovative solution to help such men regain a masculine identity. This important book tells the story of four brain-injured men who suffered because they had lost the roles, relationships, and activities that had once defined their identities as adult men. Most traumatic brain injury is suffered between the ages of 18 and 30, when men are making the developmental transition from adolescent to young adult roles. TBI interrupts that transition and often sends men back into an infantile role, where they rapidly become frustrated. Many of the behavioral and morale problems of men with TBI can be traced to their anger at being unable to participate in the adult world of work, marriage, parenting, and independence. Brain Injury and Gender Role Strain discusses how these issues affected the four men included in the study, all of whom felt isolated, victimized, abandoned, and useless when they could not be the men they had always expected to be. Dr. Gutman's innovative approach can help men regain the gender-related social roles, activities, and rites of passage that help men construct their masculine identity. Brain Injury and Gender Role Strain provides a specialized intervention program that enabled the men to: rebuild familial roles create extended-family roles turn to mentors for guidance learn the skills to form and maintain dating relationships find meaningful community work reclaim a sense of personal competency, life control, and normality Brain Injury and Gender Role Strain offers timely and important information for health care professionals and family members of individuals with long-term brain injury. This is also an inspiring book for anyone with a brain injury who is struggling to rebuild a life as a competent adult.

Sharon A. Gutman, PhD, OTR, is Assistant Professor at Long Island University where she teaches and conducts research in the Division of Occupational Therapy