Acquired Brain Injury Awareness Week
By Aly Norman
This week (15th — 21st May) is both Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) Awareness week and Mental health Awareness week. The theme of ABI week this year is every 90 seconds. This connects with the research conducted by Headway UK that demonstrates that every 90 seconds someone in the UK is admitted to hospital with a brain injury. The theme of mental health awareness week is anxiety.
My professional roles are varied, being an academic researcher and lecturer as part of my Associate Professorship at University of Plymouth, but I am also a psychotherapist with my own business in the West Country. Alongside both these roles, I am also a Trustee of my local Headway Somerset group and work with organisations such as BABICM (British Association of Brain Injury and Complex Case Managers) and the United Kingdom Acquired Brain Injury forum (UKABIF). These roles are varies but all have the same focus — improving the lives of those with brain injury.
For those who have previously seen me speak you will know that this is an issue very close to my heart. In December 1993 my brother had a serious road traffic accident and experienced a severe traumatic brain injury. Life for Dave was never the same and he struggled for 30 years to cope with his injuries and how much life had changed for him. Sadly, there was little to no support from any organisations. He received no community neurorehabilitation after he was discharged from hospital, had little involvement with social services and was not support by the mental health services within the NHS when he was struggling to cope psychologically. He fought with substance misuse for many years and become homeless in October 2013. In June 2014 he took his own life after a period of being cuckooed by a series of drug users and dealers in the local area. His death became the focus of a Safeguarding Adults Review designed to learn lessons from the service failings he endured.
More recently, I have been proud to help support the amazing Dr Charlie Whiffin, Associate Professor in Nursing at University of Derby to create a new organisation called Anchor Point, of which I am now Deputy Chair. Anchor Point is an organisation aimed at families members after ABI, reflecting that most services that exist (albeit limited) are focused on the individual with the brain injury not family members. This is despite families usually being responsibility for providing a caring role to individuals post-discharge, taking responsibility for ‘project managing’ their loved one’s life post injury and often picking up the, at times, messy pieces that are left behind when a life is shattered by brain injury.
Anchor Point is an unincorporated national association of strategic influencers, all committed to change that will improve the lives of families after ABI. The origin of the name ‘Anchor Point’ was in the lived experience of family members feeling ‘all at sea’ with nothing to hold on to. Like ripples in a pond, family members have little to stabilise their lives after ABI in a world where they feel increasingly misunderstood or actively ignored.
In the theme of this week’s #ABIWeek, it is important to note that not only does someone get admitted to hospital with a brain injury every 90 seconds in the UK, this also means that at least one family is impacted by brain injury in that time. This can have far-reaching consequences for family members and results in feelings of burden, ambiguous loss, guilt and fear. This fear often starts as a trauma response to having a loved one experience a brain injury and continues to fears about recovery, fears about the future, fears about discharge and fears about how life will look long-term. This is particularly important to highlight this week given the focus of #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek. There are several information videos and podcasts on our Anchor Point YouTube channel so please do check these out: https://www.youtube.com/@anchorpointabi6022. We hope that this week of awareness will finally help to raise the voice of #FamiliesAfterBrainInjury.