Dr. James Kelly: Marcus Institute for Brain Health

So the Marcus Institute is a wonderful opportunity through a gift from the Marcus Foundation and Mr. Bernie Marcus, who's a co-founder of Home Depot, to help our veterans with the invisible wounds of war. So, traumatic brain injury and psychological health conditions, such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, and so forth. It's very much in the model of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence at Walter Reed, which was, and continues to be, for active duty service members. Mr. Marcus wanted us to focus on military veterans, not active duty, but also build what is a sustainable program that would continue beyond the funding cycle of his gift. The gift is for five years, very generous 30 million dollar gift, and the idea is to start a robust program that then also has a means of sustaining itself financially. Perhaps through some philanthropy, but mostly through billing conventional insurance companies and donations from individuals who come through the program. This is specifically by Bernie Marcus's expectation to help those individuals who have persistent symptoms of concussion or a worse traumatic brain injury or many traumatic brain injuries that occur during a lifetime. And so those symptoms are what get you in the door, so to speak. If, in fact, there are what we call comorbid psychological health conditions. Again those being post-traumatic stress and depression and so forth, we're prepared to handle that as well. So the team that we have is psychological health experts, neurological trauma counseling, vestibular balance and inner ear disturbance kinds of expertise. The idea is to have an interdisciplinary team. A one-stop shop, if you will, for individuals for whom there is no such other location for them to go where all of that subject matter expertise is assembled in one place. This video was produced by BrainLine thanks to generous support from the Infinite Hero Foundation.