People who have suffered from brain injuries will have a new facility to help in their rehabilitation.

Community Transitions, a program of Black Hills Workshop, recently hosted an open house to welcome the public to classrooms, a conference area and an exercise room where people with brain injuries begin their work on rehabilitation

Inside the transitions building, at 803 Soo San Drive, visiting families, friends and community members found more than 200 programs developed to help the brain-injured person improve memory, lengthen attention and strengthen skills. Counselors also help injured people rediscover their strengths while understanding the changes they have experienced.

The staff offers a team approach to help people who have suffered brain trauma.

Counselor Justine Ashokar helps people deal with their emotional side, especially those who need to come to terms with their new life. This includes their families.

"They will have emotional changes, low frustration levels," she said.

It is important that the individual's family or loved ones be part of the process so that they understand and can keep up this ongoing support as the person heals.

"Family education is tremendously helpful at this time," she said.

Depending on the severity of their injury, many people will not resume their careers. If their identity was wrapped around their career, Ashokar said, many people will have difficulty dealing with their life without their jobs.

"I try to help them appreciate the new changes and move on with their lives," she said.

She said that brain injury can occur through accidents, strokes, aneurysms, assault or simply a fall. The injury affects the part of the brain that involves memory, speed, visual processing, impulse control, language and speech.

"Memory is the big issue. It is almost universal in any brain injury. Memory is affected," Ashokar said.

While Ashokar deals with the emotional changes in clients' lives, Leah Jester, a cognitive therapist, works to strengthen and build their memory, reasoning and abstract thought processes.

"We target their fundamental skills with an assessment," Jester said.

Jester then administers a functional assessment, which will be part of an individual work plan that will be explained in depth at a conference with the client and family.

Then from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays, Jester and other staff members help clients work with computer programming that will improve reasoning, visual spatial, visual perception, visual reasoning, mental flexibility, scanning, problem solving, abstract reasoning and memory.

"We're targeting exactly what they need to work on. We're fine-tuning their rehabilitation," Jester said.

Like all tools, they begin with low-level activities before going on to more difficult and abstract concepts. "It's a major activity and can be very tiring," she said.

Jester said that of all of the energy produced by the body, the brain soaks up most of the energy. As it rewires after an injury, the brain works doubly hard to build new processing measures, quickly draining energy.

"This is very difficult work," she said of the rehabilitation.

Before Jester begins her programming, James Gardiner, a neuropsychologist, has done an assessment on the client.

"Memory and attention are the most affected. About 75 percent of my referrals are because of memory," Gardiner said.

The assessment takes four hours to complete, which includes the person's emotional acumen as well as his or her mental capacity. Other areas assessed are attention, memory, language, spatial relationships and executive function.

With the results, Community Transitions staff can begin a plan, set goals and execute those plans, he said.

"They can also adjust the plan if it doesn't work," Gardiner said.

Gardiner has assessed people who suffered an injury as long as 20 years ago. Their symptoms of personality changes, low frustration or anger levels, struggles to hold jobs and short-term memory problems have been overlooked.

"It's a silent epidemic. As long as you present well, you can smile and walk, you may walk away from an accident that may lead to a life of struggle with memory and confusion," he said.

Contact Jomay Steen at 394-8418 or jomay.steen@rapidcityjournal.com.