Mood Issues at Work with Brain Injury

Stories about Mood Issues at Work after Brain Injury

The following are stories of real life survivors of brain injury.  Clicking on the titles will take you to their actual story.

Gina  Mood and Emotional Problems

When asked about dealing with angry customers at work she states; “You know I’m pretty good about that. My biggest thing is just calming them down. I’ll write down, if they’ll write down their problems or try to just repeat this is what the problem is. This is what you think. I’m, I actually think I’m pretty good at it because I rarely, I’ve only had a few instances where somebody is just swearing at me. I’ve been called names and I calmly actually say, I’m sorry but I am not listening to you calling my, calling me names and if you want to talk about this, that’s fine but you call me one more name, I’m hanging up and I have done that.”

Michael – Getting Along with Co-Workers a Brain Injury Challenge

Perhaps the single biggest challenge for someone returning to work after a brain injury is the challenge of getting along with co-workers. Work is increasingly so not a place where an employee does his job in isolation. As employment environments have become less disciplined, less structured, more and more of surviving in the workplace is how other employees interact with you. Another criterion is to be able to maintain a consistent mood at work without either being distracted by your coworkers or having your moods distract them. Do you have trouble with that?: “They would distract me more than my moods, because I couldn’t handle office gossip. I couldn’t handle people always coming to me with advice or asking for advice or telling me how much they dislike this other worker and put me in the middle, that would really aggravate me.” Is that because you have so much that you can only focus on at one time and worrying about the personalities and politics of other people is more than you can handle?: “Yes. Where I can focus on the work great, but when the human conditions started focusing in to the work, I could not do that.”