Hi All, thanks for your help and concerns. You gave some ideas I had not considered. We live in California and did attend a brain injury support group a couple of times, which helped us feel better. We were imagining my brother would attend but of course he wants nothing to do with it.

I cannot understate the problem of his refusals. He is not a teenager we can control. He will NOT consider a group home, a half-way house, or a homeless shelter. He told me he'd live in the streets before that. He ridicules the suggestion for a psychotherapist and he will not take medications. He was kicked out of outpatient therapy for refusing to practice his trade there in preparation for independent living, because they would not pay him for the work. This is a man who was self-employed for 20 years, fiercely independent, now living with his parents hundreds of miles from his child and his beloved home town, fully convinced there is nothing wrong with his brain and resentful to anyone suggesting otherwise.

He has been told that this TBI was almost certainly caused by his drinking. Yet he won't accept it, and now after everything he has been through and been told, he says that on his 12 month anniversary he might drink a beer or two.

Our family is running out of money. The thousands of dollars in donations we used to pay his insurance premiums and other needs are gone now. This month we cannot afford to pay his premiums any longer. We are saving what little is left to help him rent a room, and basic other needs.

Apparently in his last tests in a controlled therapy environment, his cognitive performance was fairly average, with only one or two areas in the low average. So he no doubt is making progress, but outside that environment, however, he easily becomes confused and overstimulated.

In February, his impairments were listed as:

- refusals and frustration limiting his ability to return to independent living; requires supervision
- episodes of confusion and agitation; confabulations
- poor memory; decreased awareness/insight into deficits
- significantly poor attention and slow processing speed
- visual deficits (since corrected with glasses)

One problem he seems to have is with reasoning verbally, or listening to verbal reasoning. This correlates with the fact that I have not once ever heard him say, "You're right" or "That makes sense" in my endless hours of dialog and debate with him since this TBI. I believe his ability to process a verbal line of reasoning is very poor, which may explain why he mishears people. He is probably just filling in the gaps of misunderstanding by confabulating.

I think there is a possibility that we aren't being tough enough with him. My parents are not capable. They've had to literally hide upstairs in a room (along with the family dog) during his rants and raves on several occasions. Plus, as the experts say and experience has taught, once a brain injured person "flips", they cannot be reasoned with for a few minutes. His switch flips almost instantly, so it is going to take time. But maybe I can drill it into that something is wrong so that he will actually ask for help, and begin to accept his brain is not better after all. That would be the miracle that we need.

Also, a side note: a year prior to this TBI my brother exhibited behavior that concerned me and several friends, like becoming less organized, making dumb-seeming mistakes, and repeating himself during conversations. I attributed it to stress or drinking, but now we are all asking ourselves whether he did not have something going wrong already cognitively. Perhaps he had a pre-existing TBI. He certainly crashed and bashed himself plenty of times over the years on his job and in sports.