
Artists who survived brain injuries but found a new craft - headmelted
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-38102932
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flycaliguy
I'm a brain injury survivor, I was hit by a driver running a red at >40mph.
It's so important to have stories like this out there. It's a condition that
is complex, individual and often hard to explain to the people in your life.
Beyond the physical tells, my resulting mood disorder became intertwined with
concentration problems that seriously inhibited my path to recovery.

I developed a cannabis addiction and when my lawsuit settled virtually
everyone I knew, including members of my family, became so jealous of my
windfall that my support network disappeared. My depression only deepened. I
studied psychology part time in university and slowly recovered. Not working
for 5 years though completely turned my group of friends, who also come from a
blue collar background, against me. My efforts to wear a smile and share my
wealth only tainted things further as they became convinced I was just a lazy
lottery winner. People most willing to spend time with me and smoke my weed
became the most eager to shame me among others.

I now medicate with the help of a doctor and his drugs work much better. I'm
in a supportive relationship and although many people from those days still
fail to understand my condition, I've mostly cut them from my life.

I also make art as therapy, I purchased a couple analog synthesizers and get
great benefits out of a session of designing and recording sound. It's really
a great art form for geeks looking for something outside visual art. You can
create very complex signal paths when feeling ambitious or just experiment
with some knob twisting and random plugging. Both methods have about the same
success rate as far as interesting sound creation goes. Former cannabis users
will get great satisfaction as they overcome the problem of music feeling dull
outside of intoxication.

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Bombthecat
Holly, shit, that sounds like my life. After my accident I also started to
abuse drugs. Stopped, recovered. Finished a tough education. Make now good
money. Friends are also kinda oissy (except the poorest one) (stopped looong
ago now like twenty years now) but i wonder if there is some kind of
correlation between brain injuries and drug abuse?

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flycaliguy
Oh yeah, drug abuse is a common thing to come across in TBI support groups.
Executive functioning and self regulation issues, frontal lobe stuff and
impulse control. It's where the TBI people go Venn diagram with the ADD/ADHD
people.

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Bombthecat
You think add/adhd existed before the tbi and the accident made it worse and
the drug abuse is a way you try to control it?

~~~
flycaliguy
Definitely a possibility. Without testing from before an accident its a bit of
a guessing game with anecdotal evidence from family members.

But yeah, based off my experience I can totally see how a smart kid with ADD
that floated through the system would find a tbi suddenly making previous
obstacles into show stoppers. Same with depression. When your executive
functioning takes a hit you are now operating without the full feature set.

These things do tend to play off each other and it's easy to start pilling
disorders up once you've got a few biggies. My doctors generally tried to pull
me away from playing a labeling game. Studying psychology during my recovery
had me basically diagnosing myself with new stuff every term. Instead we
worked towards pragmatic goals of reestablishing my concentration, healthy
sleeping and impulse regulation.

It occurs to me now that living in Canada perhaps made the process of
arranging specialists easier.

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wespad
There's a great documentary about Frank Frazetta called Painting with Fire.
Later in life he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right hand. He taught
himself to paint and draw again with his left.

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celticninja
This sounds like an ad from the radio in GTA V for lobotomies as a way of
removing any existential angst you may be suffering from.

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ablation
The headline chosen by the BBC does not sit well with me. "Take my brain out"
feels very click bait-y, and maybe even slightly exploitative. "I take my
brain out and recharge it" is the snippet of that quote in context.

