**2. Medicalization of PCS**

PCS has not shared the fate of other psychological disorders. Like depression, PCS is diagnosed from behavioral and physiological signs (such as alcohol intolerance and problems shifting focus) and subjective symptoms (such as decreased musiclistening pleasure). Also like depression, for PCS there is no neurological, biogenetic, or hormonal diagnostic procedure. However, depression remains in *DSM-5* and PCS does not. The *DSM-5* task force explains, "[s]ymptoms previously termed *postconcussive* (e.g., headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light or sound, irritability, concentration deficits) can occur in brain-injured and non-brain injured populations, including individuals with acute stress disorder" ([1], p. 286). The argument is that the causal linkage between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and PCS breaks down because the symptoms of PCS can be attributed to additional causes (such as Acute Stress Disorder). As such, PCS is eliminated from *DSM-5*, and can be understood as either a variation of Acute Stress Disorder or TBI. An acquired brain injury rehabilitation specialist can be recommended for TBI; a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist can be recommended for

Acute Stress Disorder. The authors commend this reclassification because it recognizes that brain injuries are to be studied by neurologists and other medical specialists while transformations to one's existence are to be studied by psychologists.

While the present analysis aims at PCS in the latter psychological sense, it is worth mentioning that acquired brain injury (ABI) specialists have found it appropriate and even necessary to adopt an existential-phenomenological perspective as well. American rehabilitation physician and scholar Gary Goldberg [2] explains how "brain injury deeply affect[s] the subjectivity of the person injured—that is, their existence as a human person—because of the potentially significant aspects of personhood impacted…, it can also produce significant problematic impairment of self-awareness" (p. 397). Like neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein [3] argued nearly a century earlier, Goldberg and others have called for a transformation of the philosophical paradigm that has traditionally been used to understand brain injury [4–9].
