"There's a lot that's different, but it's still me": exploring podcast narratives of emotional adjustment after encephalitis.

Background: Encephalitis can lead to acquired brain injury (ABI) with neuropsychiatric consequences. Emotional adjustment is important for ensuring positive, long-term outcomes. The transdiagnostic cognitive behavioral therapy (T-CBT) model offers a way of understanding adjustment post-encephalitis but has not yet been tested. We qualitatively assessed whether the T-CBT model accurately captured recovery experiences post-encephalitis and whether experiences differed between infectious and autoimmune encephalitis.

Methods: A directed content analysis was used to inductively code spoken experiences of encephalitis survivors (n = 15), as told through public podcasts, and apply a deductive coding framework built from the T-CBT model. A second inductive content analysis was used to explore the podcast interview questions.

Results: The T-CBT model broadly captured the experiences of emotional adjustment post-encephalitis. Threat to self-identity and responses to these threats, amongst other contextual factors, were important. An additional major category emerged to capture the impact of encephalitis on close others. No discernible pattern was found between survivors of infectious (n = 6) and autoimmune (n = 6) encephalitis.

Conclusions: The T-CBT model with additional systemic factors can help to understand emotional adjustment after encephalitis and provides a rationale for psychological therapy as a treatment during the recovery phase.