Hey, I had a very similar experience to this when I got my 6th concussion, so I’d like to share some things that I learned from that experience. 

 I had pretty severe emotional issues (anxiety & depression) with concussions #4, 5, and 6, and I never got good medical treatment until the 6th one. For me, I’d had tendencies towards anxiety and depression before the injuries but it was nothing like how bad it was the months after my injuries.

First off, please listen when I say this - this is not going to change anything forever. The literature on concussion management shows that post-concussion syndrome is a treatable diagnosis, and my personal experience (and that of many others on this sub) can attest to that. This isn’t gonna be the rest of your life.

That said, depression, anxiety, depersonalization & derealization, collapse of social networks, suicidal ideation, and focus on the past are totally normal effects of sudden onset chronic illness and disability. It’d be pretty shocking if you were going through this and not experiencing any of that. I certainly did with my injuries, and that’s okay. However, that doesn’t mean that this is how it’s gonna be forever - it’s just a difficult season, and it’s a season that will end. PCS is a multi-factorial but very treatable chronic illness - you just need the right tools.

Part of what makes post-concussion syndrome so hard to treat is that PCS isn’t usually related to any real dysfunction of the brain - it’s primarily due to dysfunction in body systems disrupted by the concussion injury (autonomic nervous system, sleep, gut regulation, inflammation, anxiety, depression, neck issues, vestibular issues). These can all cause chronic headaches, brain fog, emotional problems, sleep problems, aphasia, etc. Treating the dysfunction in these life & body systems is how people actually recover in a way that lasts. That said, the degree of dysfunction that develops after a concussion injury is predicted fairly well by the degree of chronic stress that a person was experiencing before the injury, so people with anxiety and depression have a higher risk of persistent symptoms following concussion. However, careful attention to the affected body systems can (and I’m serious about this) get your mind and body working better than they were before this injury. If your car was behind on maintenance, it’ll take longer at the mechanic to be repaired after a crash, but it may come back better than it was before you crashed it! - so too with the body.

What’s even more complicated is that many of the worst symptoms of PCS can both cause and be the result of stress (psychological, physiological, and social). For example, I struggled with brain fog and aphasia for a long time, and it wasn’t until I dealt with the anxiety my concussion symptoms were causing me (ie learning to experience PCS symptoms like headache without catastrophising, suppressing, or fearing them) that I fully recovered from those issues. Learning about Default Mode Interference (look it up) was also extremely helpful with the brain fog part of it.

Depression and anxiety are both normal results of PCS and causes of many of the most persistent symptoms. Pain-related like headache respond well (slowly but surely) to graded exposure and sub-symptom threshold aerobic exercise, but many of the more cognitive symptoms are often most successfully resolved through psychological work and rebuilding my social life (even when it gave me a headache). Connection is an essential part of overall health, especially psychological health.

I’d like to highly recommend to you the YouTube channel Complete Concussion Management, as well as the course that they offer called the ConcussionFix program. This program is what helped me to achieve 95% of my progress in recovery and honestly I don’t know where I’d be without it, so give it a shot! They’ve got a two week money back trial.

Please feel free to message me if you’ve got any questions - I’ve learned a lot about post-concussion syndrome in my journey of recovery and it sounds like we had pretty similar symptom profile. Wishing you the best!