March is Brain Injury Awareness Month. To kick it off, I am excited to share an interview I did recently with Jasper Delichte from Voices of Brain Injury. Keep reading to learn about her organization, and to read an excerpt from the interview. For more information and resources about brain injury, visit the Brain Injury Association of America’s website, or our Resources page. We’ve also written a number of previous blog posts about brain injury you may want to check out:
About Voices of Brain Injury
I asked Jasper to share a little about their organization:
“Voices of Brain Injury was founded in early 2021, by my friend Vivian. Vivian was volunteering with a local brain injury organization in Victoria, Canada. She noticed that inspirational stories helped to raise hope for brain injury survivors and wanted to offer a resource for individuals to share their stories. Vivian asked if I wanted to help her start up this project. I was the first person to join, but I am now leading a team of over 25 volunteers from across the world! We have grown so much over the past years, developing a strong team of volunteers and conducting many interviews.
The aim of our organization is to help bridge the gap between the general public and the brain injury community. We conduct online interviews with brain injury survivors, healthcare workers, caregivers, and family members. There is so much stigma associated with brain injuries, so we hope to help raise awareness of the challenges that survivors face, while also giving people a platform to share their stories!”
Visit the “About” page on the Voices of Brain Injury website to learn more about the organization. Visit their “Stories” page to read their growing collection of stories and interviews.
Speech Therapy After Brain Injury
I spoke with Jasper in January about the important role of speech-language pathologists after brain injury. You can read our full interview on their website. Below is an excerpt from the interview, where we talked about how speech therapy can help after a brain injury:
Can you please tell me a bit about your role as a speech language pathologist?
Before I had my own private practice I didn’t realize how little people knew about speech language pathology. I think one of the problems is that usually it’s just called “speech” therapy. So, understandably, people think it’s just helping with your speech: articulation, like how I’m saying my sounds; maybe disfluency or stuttering; or voice. Many people also think of word finding, if people are having trouble thinking of the word that they are trying to say.
Speech language pathologists also help with all kinds of cognitive and communication skills, so if you’re having trouble with attention or focusing, short term memory, executive function skills – so planning, organizing, problem solving – that all affects communication. And you can see when you start looking at all the different cognitive-communication skills, those are so important for work and school and for your social roles with your family and with friends, so that’s a realm that we can support people after a brain injury.
One of the things that I love the most is that it is also so individualized. Each person is coming to me with different life experiences and different goals, and so the therapy is so meaningful. We are talking about what it is that you specifically want to be able to do and then that’s what we are working on.