Obstacles to remediating coping following traumatic brain injury

Coping has been suggested as the final common pathway related to outcome after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Different types of coping have been related to either positive or negative psychosocial outcomes. As a result, a small set of studies have attempted to remediate coping through intervention, but the effectiveness of these studies has been modest.

We propose that three primary factors are limiting our ability to effectively remediate coping following TBI through intervention TBI: 1) limited understanding of inter-patient variability following TBI; 2) limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying coping following TBI; and 3) reliance on self-report measures of coping. We discuss these obstacles in the context of a model of frontal lobe function, and in light of recent behavioural work on coping.