Neuropsychologist Kim Gorgens Helps Rebuild Lives After TBIs

At the intersection of the complex, inner workings of the human brain and the stark realities of the criminal justice system lies the work of Kim Gorgens. A professor in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology, Gorgens’ research has created life-changing opportunities for those impacted by traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) through a brain injury screening program based on her Colorado Brain Injury Model.

Individuals with TBIs are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. A study Gorgens conducted in 2020 found the average prevalence of TBI history among adults in Colorado jails and problem-solving courts is 54%.

We sat down with Gorgens to learn more about her passion for teaching and empowering individuals with brain injuries.

What’s your favorite part about teaching?

There are a few students in every cohort who will have an epiphany moment, and I can never predict who they are. In my neuropsychology class, everyone will rotate through a jail-based setting—either a county jail, probation office, a halfway house—and do a neuropsych evaluation under my supervision. For them to feel genuinely helpful and to see the richness of the clinical work is why I do it.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your research?

If you look at the scope of the need, it’s easy to lose sight of the difference that you’re making because of the number of people who want and need service. I get mail every day from people in the criminal legal system all around the country who really need help. So, it’s probably that—it’s just feeling overwhelmed by how many people need help.

We have cohorts of 40 to 45 students at a time doing the work and a research team of 15 or 20 students. So, we’re doing our absolute best and working at top capacity, but that system is so broken and needs so much help. There’s so much to do.

What’s the most rewarding part of working with individuals with brain injury as they rebuild their lives?

We use what we know about someone’s history, their psychological functioning, their cognitive functioning and brain injury history, and we have a conversation with the individual in a way that promotes self-advocacy. We tell them, ‘Here’s this thing you may not have known about yourself and here’s what we call it, and here’s what might be helpful, here are some tools or strategies’—and we empower people.

For example, it's having conversations like, ‘Your memory is terrible, but here's the way that you're going to address it. You're going to have to carry a pencil, and you have to take notes if you need to remember something that someone tells you.’

What I’ve found in my career is that the change we see in people who are so dehumanized—who have internalized all the messages about themselves as being garbage and disposable and just altogether broken—has been really extraordinary. I want to encourage them to use their voice, to use the tools and ask for what they need.

How do you unwind or recharge after working on such intense topics?

I kind of joke that, by day, I work with human brains and the cadaver brains in the biology freezer, and, at night, what I love is a zombie movie. Maybe there's a throughline there; we have a few colleagues here who are also horror-movie buffs. We get together for pizza and pay-per-view or go to the theater. It’s the least adaptive coping, but if there's a scary movie out there, I'm first in line to see it.

What’s one brain myth you’d love to debunk once and for all?

We talk about brain injuries like they’re the boogeyman: If you get a concussion, you’re going to have dementia. The truth is, it's so much more complicated than that. A lot of us have vulnerable brains for reasons that are outside of our control—and that may offer a little bit of solace. Our capacity for recovery is truly extraordinary.