Nearly half of all homeless men suffered brain injury before losing homes
By Eric Pfeiffer (Yahoo News)

From Dr. Jane Topolovec-Vranic (St. Michael’s Hospital):

“A new study is shining light on the origins of homelessness, finding that nearly half of homeless men have suffered a traumatic brain injury and that nearly all of those injuries occurred before the men became homeless.

The St. Michael’s Hospital study found that 45 percent of the homeless men who participated in the research had suffered some form of traumatic brain injury (TBI). And amongst them, 87 percent of their brain injuries had occurred before the men became homeless.

‘You could see how it would happen,’ said Dr. Jane Topolovec-Vranic, who led the study. ‘You have a concussion, and you can’t concentrate or focus. Their thinking abilities and personalities change. They can’t manage at work, and they may lose their job, and eventually lose their families. And then it’s a negative spiral.’”

As I read this, my first thought was that many of these homeless men were once students in our public schools. I’d like to highlight one line from further down the article that reads: “Injury commonly predated the onset of homelessness, with most participants experiencing their first injury in childhood.”

If an injury proves severe enough, students will rapidly be funneled into special education, their problems with impulse control and information retention too obvious to miss in screenings. Lucky kids get tracked for interventions. The machinery kicks in to help them.

Brain injuries result in spectrum disorders, however, and not every child gets thrown a life preserver. How hyperactive is too hyperactive? How aggressive is too aggressive? At what point does short-term memory difficulty shine out clearly enough to be noticed for what it is, instead of being attributed to lack of studying or effort?

I might be able to predict periods of homelessness for a number of my students. Not all of these students were or are receiving services. Some are clinging to the edge of functionality. Some have been tested for special education and “passed,” supposedly needing no extra help. “This is a classroom management issue,” a dean wrote on one referral from last year. Classroom talking IS a classroom management issue. Classroom blurting of off-topic, irrelevant information unrelated to the day’s topic may point toward greater needs than a new seating chart, however. Random blurting can indicate generalized anxiety, or a brain that cannot pull itself into and stay with the material at hand.

A sad truth of our time: many children start life with drugs in their system or drugs in the air they breathe. The research on cocaine babies has become murky, since more fortunate babies grow up without apparent residual difficulties from that post-natal drug withdrawal, while others are documented to suffer long-term attention and impulse-management problems.

Here’s the point I most want to make: Children are not mass-produced Blank Slates. Not all children can learn exactly the same things at the same time according to some preordained curricular schedule. Some children require extra help and time to hit targets — and here in 2020, we may be about to increase the population of those children, possibly dramatically. That COVID brain fog is real. 

The first part of this post was written in 2014, and is about to be moved up into the year 2020. An M.D. friend of mine caught COVID nearly two months ago and has been struggling with its aftereffects. My exhausted friend is fighting that brain fog and has other problems. Her sense of smell has gone sideways and food does not smell delicious, if it smells at all. She has dropped a few things, including a heavy soup pot, for no reason she understands. Her muscles feel weak. I can hear her fighting for air sometimes. And there are no openings for appointments at the long-haul COVID clinic until March. 

Research strongly suggests COVID-19 virus enters the brain (medicalxpress.com). To quote William A. Banks, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine:  “Many of the effects that the COVID virus has could be accentuated or perpetuated or even caused by virus getting in the brain and those effects could last for a very long time.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released data showing that lingering symptoms such as fatigue, cough, headache, loss of taste and smell, and confusion were common among 18 to 34 year-olds two to three weeks after they tested positive. (91 Percent of COVID Survivors Have This in Common, Study Says (msn.com)). There’s growing reason to believe that many adolescents will experience long-term effects. 

Yes, most little kids appear to be safe from severe COVID-19. Brain inflammation and other inflammatory responses happen to our smallest kids, but those complications remain quite rare. As children move on to middle school and high school, though, the rate of infection climbs. And children don’t have magic immunity to COVID’s inflammatory aftermath. We have vaccines now, but no magic bullets. 

Across America, children and adolescents are struggling with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C. According to the Mayo Clinic, “in children with MIS-C, organs and tissues such as the heart, lungs, digestive system, and brain can become severely inflamed.” Children Are Covid-19 Long-Haulers, Too | by Ashley Zlatopolsky | Nov, 2020 | Elemental (medium.com) Healthy young people can even keel over, like Keyontae Johnson, the college basketball player who collapsed and fell face-first onto the court during a Florida State game on December 12th. He ended up being placed in a medically-induced coma. Slightly less than two weeks later, Keyontae left the hospital yesterday. 

Some of America’s students are getting sick, and some of those sick students are not bouncing back in a few days, or a week or two. Those students are taking time to recover, and may not recover fully — not in the sense of returning to the health they enjoyed before falling ill. My 2014 post dealt with brain injuries. All across this country right now, young people are sustaining brain injuries, even if those injuries are caused by a microbe, rather than drugs or accidents. 

To anyone demanding that we open schools, I’d like to suggest reflecting on this post for a bit. Will Keyontae play in the NBA? I fervently hope so, but I don’t know that we can be sure he will even be back on the court again. This virus can hammer a person — any person, even one in excellent health. Yes, 80% of those who die of COVID are 65 years or older, but the flipside of that statistic tells us 20% who die are under 65.

And kids are getting sick all over the place. By mid-November, more than 1,000,000 U.S. children had had COVID. Given the many open schools and lack of responsible leadership in some areas, that pediatric explosion should hardly come as a surprise. Some of those kids will be long haulers. 

Eduhonesty: Why should we keep schools closed? The fact is that this disease can be the source of traumatic brain injuries — inflammation of the brain is now a well-known complication — my friend hallucinated — and medical science cannot yet tell when or even if that inflammation will fully pass. Nor can it tell what complications inflammation may leave behind. The extent of recoveries can be expected to vary widely. A previous post talks about a young woman in a wheelchair 6 months out. 

To those bureaucrats and others who want to say, “eventually the sick people will get better,” I’d like to say, “You can’t and shouldn’t count on that.” Spinal cord and brain injuries in humans often leave permanent aftereffects. That’s one reason why we are so scared of strokes, one known complication of COVID infection. That’s part of the reason why assisted living facilities were so full when COVID swept through them — the many men and women receiving therapy to get back on their feet, or simply to learn how to manage the transfer board that would help them get from their wheelchair into the shower seat in their home bathroom. Hell, that’s the reason my husband’s in a wheelchair. 

In viral hotspots today, opening schools is akin to stepping directly into the path of the bus or high-diving into the shallow pond. 

I am writing again today to encourage people not to walk in front of the bus. I am also predicting a swelling of the special education rolls in the next few years. The studies are in and they are showing long-term effects, even in children. A push for open schools this year has the potential to lead to physiological damage that may linger for years or even decades. And, of course, a few children and more adults will die from those hallway passing periods and other grouping risks. 

I want to close this post by taking us full circle back to the beginning of its 2014 inspiration:

From Dr. Jane Topolovec-Vranic (St. Michael’s Hospital):

“A new study is shining light on the origins of homelessness, finding that nearly half of homeless men have suffered a traumatic brain injury and that nearly all of those injuries occurred before the men became homeless.

The St. Michael’s Hospital study found that 45 percent of the homeless men who participated in the research had suffered some form of traumatic brain injury (TBI). And amongst them, 87 percent of their brain injuries had occurred before the men became homeless.

‘You could see how it would happen,’ said Dr. Jane Topolovec-Vranic, who led the study. ‘You have a concussion, and you can’t concentrate or focus. Their thinking abilities and personalities change. They can’t manage at work, and they may lose their job, and eventually lose their families. And then it’s a negative spiral.’”

We owe it to America’s children and the adults who work in our schools to prevent that spiral from ever starting. Because COVID will end. But it won’t be over.