I started this blog because I felt that as an advocate, sometimes I needed to comment on American politics, to advance my agenda of finding justice for my clients and others with brain injury. Justice to a significant degree means due process of law, which can be largely reduced to making sure that your full story is heard.
For brain injury survivors, injustice too often happens because their story is never heard by those making judgments about their condition and treatment. And far too much of the reason that the story is never heard is that the doctors don’t know what they should be listening for. Diagnosing and understanding brain injury disability is about the application of clinical wisdom to the individualized facts of the injury and deficits. The only way that a professional can gain that wisdom is by listening to the TBI Voice.
I launched http://tbivoices.com to tell the TBI story. Through the TBI Voices project, we are providing an internet archive of brain injury voices. The goal is to create a comprehensive treatment of the subjective aspects of TBI. Each story includes the voice of the survivor, the context injury and the nature of the treatment and disability. If this archive can become a chorus of brain injury voices, it may influence the diagnosis and treatment of TBI in a way that current research – that is based upon objective measurement of an injury that is exceedingly hard to measure and almost impossible to quantify – cannot.
To date, we have provided a platform for fourteen brain injured people to tell their story. But unlike survivor stories online, each of these stories has a similar structure, is a detailed treatment of the TBI, the severity of the injury, the rehabilitation and recovery process and current ability. http://tbivoices.com is in some way the flipside of the http://www.waiting.com/waitingbridge.html of waiting.com as it is a page filled with hope, a page filled with comebacks, a page of belief in miracles.
Here is the Table of Contents of stories on http://tbivoices.com Each day we post add part of a story on http://tbivoices.com/blog and every 15 days or so begin another story. What is also unique about http://tbivoices.com is that you can hear the survivor’s voice as the full interviews are posted on Youtube at http://youtube.com/tbivoices
I hope that through this webpage, we can provide a place where the TBI community can be heard.
Attorney Gordon Johnson