Pretraumatic Personality and Psychiatric Sequelae of Head Injury

Psychiatric symptoms are common among the sequelae of head injury.¹These symptoms may vary in quantity, intensity and duration from case to case. At one extreme may be merely increased irritability. At the other extreme may be a fully developed neurotic syndrome. In association with these symptoms are often prolonged invalidism and delay in resumption of occupation, or, in military life, delay in return to active duty.³ Various opinions have been offered as to the causation of these post-traumatic psychiatric syndromes. The subject has been ably reviewed by Strauss and Savitzky⁴and by Schilder.⁵The belief was expressed that the psychiatric sequelae of head injury are due mainly to anatomic and physiologic changes in the brain,⁶that they result from an interest in gaining compensation,⁷that they are largely ascribable to pretraumatic abnormalities of the personality⁸and that there is high correlation with