Brain Damage in Relation to Psychiatric Disability After Head Injury

The extent to which psychiatric disability after head injury depends upon the brain damage which has occurred remains a problem of considerable practical and theoretical interest. In 1904 Adolf Meyer saw the need for caution in approaching this question since there was “no direct measure of the damage of a concussion”; similarly in 1945 Denny-Brown saw that the most serious obstacles to better understanding still lay in the difficulty of obtaining a reliable estimate of the severity of injury to the brain and in the impossibility of differentiating clinically between simple skull fracture, laceration or contusion of the brain.