Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
On March 16, a grassroots committee hosted the Worland Mental Fitness Fair at the Worland Community Center.
Members of the panel were Dr. Ralph Louis, psychologist from Oxbow Center in Basin; Janae Harman, owner of Family Circle Counseling in Worland; Mary Johnson, CEO of Oxbow Center in Worland; and Carol Bell, provisionally licensed therapist at Foundations Counseling in Cody.
The panel answered prepared questions that came from the committee and from similar events in Shell, Greybull and Cowley.
The Northern Wyoming News will be covering the questions on a weekly basis throughout the next several weeks.
How does a therapist address traumatic brain injuries?
Louis: This is one of those ones, that is definitely a whole body thing. This is one where a person is not going to need just one therapist, but they’re going to need help for many areas of their life. It might be occupational therapy, it might be social therapy, it might be physical therapy, it might be speech therapy. There’s going to be a lot of need to help a person with traumatic brain injury.
As a mental health therapist, the thing that is probably most important as I see it is to realize that you are still valuable. You may not be what you think you were before. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that you are still a valuable person, and that you have still much to contribute.
And if you’re in relationships with people, often working on those relationships as a way to help get through that traumatic injury to, is to accept the help, accept the fact that sometimes they may be a little bit too helpful, that maybe sometimes they’re going to be a little overbearing even or impatient with you. That’s OK. That’s because they want to be engaged with you and they want to be part of your life and they want to help.
None of us probably would know, on an expert level, what to do to help someone in our family who has a traumatic brain injury before it happens. Their life is changing too, along with yours, and they’re learning. Having that social engagement is one of the most powerful things that I have noticed that helps people through traumatic brain injury, because it’s a long hard process to work through traumatic brain injury. There are often permanent changes, and learning to accept those permanent changes and moving on with the people in your life, I think that’s the thing that a mental health therapist can help you with.
Harman: For me there’s two things, I work with them on the grief of what they’ve lost. Because going from a specific state, and that can be any transition, really a specific state to a different state, there’s lots of loss involved.
Then we really focus on strengths, and how to amplify those and how they can build on those to feel good about themselves and have purpose and meaning in the state that they’re in. So well, it’s more generalized to like any change, that would apply to TB as well.
Next question: What are your opinions about using psychedelics to treat PTSD and end of life issues?