Purpose in Life After Brain Injury: Expanding the Focus and Impact of Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a life-altering event that can abruptly and drastically derail an individual's expected life trajectory. While some adults who have sustained a TBI go on to make a full recovery, many live with persisting disability many years postinjury. Helping patients adjust to and flourish with disability that may persist should be as much a part of rehabilitative practice as addressing impairment, activity, and participation-level changes after TBI. Living with a sense of purpose in daily life has been shown to provide numerous health and psychological benefits in the general population, especially in the face of major life transitions. In this article, we argue that rehabilitative professionals across disciplines can fruitfully leverage the construct of purpose in life to lend structure, meaning, and intrinsic motivation to TBI rehabilitation and to the recrafting of lives in the aftermath of unexpected change.

We provide a narrative review of the literature relevant to recovery and long-term well-being after TBI and of the role of purpose in daily life in promoting well-being in the general population. We then outline avenues for, and potential benefits of, incorporating a focus on purpose in life into TBI rehabilitation and discuss future directions in purpose-in-life rehabilitation research.

We propose that an overarching rehabilitative focus on purpose in daily life could improve well-being after TBI by grounding therapeutic services in a construct that meaningfully connects traditional rehabilitation targets to patients' broader lives, while concurrently addressing injury-related purpose disruption, in order to promote flourishing after brain injury irrespective of a person's degree of functional recovery.