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Home Base, a free Red Sox Foundation and Mass General Hospital program, started small, but then and now—as it has grown to help 1,000s of veterans and service members nationwide—it remains a passion for many. The program focuses on treating the invisible wounds of war like TBI and PTSD. With evidence-based treatments in all domains like behavioral therapy, physical therapy, health and wellness, and medications, providers help these warriors with issues that run the gamut from sleep apnea and cognitive function to depression and physical pain.

For many service members and veterans, traumatic brain injury and PTSD often go hand in hand, with some of the symptoms of these conditions being co-morbid. By using evidence-based treatments, providers work with their patients with the goal of getting them as symptomless as possible.

Changes don’t happen 0-60 mph, rather they occur incrementally. Providers know that barriers can impede improvement to healing, but by setting a series of step-by-step goals—whether treatments for better sleep, pain relief, or relationship strategies— service members and veterans can see improvements to their physical, behavioral, and emotional issues and build on them from there.

The Road Home Program has had great success treating both female and male survivors of military sexual trauma. Through cognitive processing therapy and other therapies like mindfulness and therapeutic arts—working with providers and alongside peers who have had similar experiences—survivors of military sexual trauma can transform their feelings of powerlessness into a stronger sense of self.

Telling your loved one with PTSD that you cherish them, you care about them, and that you will help them if they will let you is a powerful first step toward getting that person needed treatment. You can’t take on someone else’s suffering—unproductive, anyway—but you can steer them toward the resources and providers who can help them.

At Rush’s Road Home Program, providers use evidence-based cognitive processing therapies and other data-driven therapies like mindfulness to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This intensive treatment model effects far more cures for PTSD in veterans than the traditional, one-on-one, long-term psychotherapy model. Rush is working to offer their therapy model to other populations who may experience PTSD like police, firefighters, first responders, and emergency department staff.

For most, the brain's limbic system activates “fight or flight” in response to intense emotions, then calms down. When triggered from trauma, those with PTSD remain in that activated state of hypervigilance. Over time those changes can affect sleep and mood disorders.

Originally, the Home Base program focused primarily on the brain injury, itself, of service members and veterans. With time, experience, and research, the program now approaches treating brain injury from a holistic method as other issues affect brain health—neurological, cognitive, and psychological functions—like sleep deprivation, chronic pain, or co-occurring substance abuse. Treating the whole person with an individually tailored plan has provided far better outcome.

There are several misconceptions around brain injury and it is important to dispel them. One is that someone with a TBI cannot get better. Not true; in fact, many, many people with TBI who are engaged in treatment get better and return to full lives. The second issue is the wishful thinking that there is one pill or technology that can cure a TBI. Not true; rather engaging in a series of evidence-based treatments and sticking to one’s treatment regimen is what helps people heal.

Home Base has been offering outpatient programs for 10 years and intensive programs for the last five, during which time they have learned two main lessons. The first is the importance of designing individual treatment plans for each person based on their biomarkers of injury, symptoms, and needs. Secondly, they learned the importance of follow through post-program—whether helping a service member or veteran learn the tools for self-management when ready or educating local practitioners to better help the military population with TBI and/or PTSD.

Oftentimes, a family member is the first to recognize symptoms of TBI and/or PTSD in their loved one who has returned from military service. At the Home Base program, veterans and service members are accompanied by a family member for part of the two-week intensive so upon returning home, the family knows better how to help their loved one understand their symptoms and aid with and ongoing treatments, interventions, medications, and general support.

Once upon a time, researchers and doctors treated all traumatic brain injuries the same, but they now know that the mechanism of injury plays a key role in diagnosis and treatment. There are many parallels for civilians and service members who sustain a traumatic brain injury, but the people are very different. Athletes who sustain a TBI most likely will not have the overlapping emotional challenges that service members may who sustained their injury in combat or in a more threatening setting. Helping service members and veterans often includes treating them for both TBI and PTSD simultaneously.