Change Your Brain Every Day - ADHD During a Pandemic

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

People with ADHD, and those they live with, can be under enormous amounts of stress even without a pandemic. But as quarantine life drags on, an even darker side of ADHD is emerging. In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen take a Brain Warrior look into recent current events to help shed some light on how we can achieve and maintain our brain and overall health, even when some of the chips seem to be stacked against us. 

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to Brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are now well into 2021, and we are talking about brain in the news today. So I want to start off with the dark side of ADHD, suicide, and the pandemic. Wow. We're into 2021 pandemics, not over. Um, very important to really discipline your thoughts and focus on your mental health, because that is going to be the thing that really helps you. But the dark side of ADHD adults with ADHD were much more likely to have attempted suicide than those without. So one in four women with ADHD have attempted suicide. 60%. Yeah. 60% of the association between ADHD and attempted suicide was attenuated when lifetime history of depression and anxiety disorders were taken into account.

Probably meaning maybe they didn't get help. I'm guessing. Female gender, lower education, attainment, substance abuse, lifetime history of depression, childhood exposure to chronic parental domestic violence were found to be independent correlates of lifetime suicide attempts among those with ADHD. Wow. This was in PubMed.

Well, let's take a minute and talk about- Let's break that down. ADHD during a pandemic. Yeah. So how do you know if you have ADHD? Well, in a pandemic, one of the tricky parts that I would think of is conflict seeking would be a problem. If you are locked in a house with people and you are conflict seeking, because that's one

of the signs of ADHD. So I was just on Dr. Phil, where Jessica, 18, completely out of control, anger. She'd been Baker acted. That's in Florida where involuntarily psychiatrically committed on several occasions. The police have been called. So is that what we think of as a 5150? 5150 here in California. And, you know, they want help from Dr. Phil. And when Dr. Phil saw this case, he goes, I need a co-therapist.

So it was really cool being Dr. Phil's co-therapist. And when we scanned her, it was so clear she had untreated ADHD. In fact, she'd been diagnosed when she was six with ADHD and learning disabilities. But because her parents got divorced and she went back and forth. She fell through the cracks. She fell through the cracks and ended up with a terrible temper, with being conflict seeking barely finished high school and had lost like five jobs like taco bell and wendy's and mcdonald's um in a period of just a couple of months and so she's getting all of these failures right and um she has low frontal lobe activity, common in people who have ADD,

had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, put on an antipsychotic, lithium. And I'm just like horrified that the primary underlying problem for this child, short attention span, distractibility, disorganization, procrastination, restlessness, impulse control, addicted to her phone, and vaping. And it's like, we don't treat her ADD. There is no way she's going to get better.

And when you have that kind of stress and repeated failure, suicide and ADHD begins to make sense. And then on top of that, they're very spontaneous and impulsive. Right. And it's not unusual to have a suicidal thought. Right. It's not unusual to go, you know, right? It's not unusual to go, you know, I'll be glad when the whole thing is done, but it's unusual to act on, but it's unusual to act on it. But if you have impulse control issues and then you'd like,

you're super angry at someone. Oh yeah. And then if you drink, you then take the break off of the little bit of break you actually have negative impulses and it can cause. Well, right now, let's like add that to a pandemic where people are they already have increased stress and increased stress makes it worse. Right. So we've got increased stress. We've got people fighting. So they're angry with people in their houses, especially if they've got ADHD and they're conflict seeking. And people with ADHD, conflict seeking, but also negative seeking. They look for what's wrong.

And they don't know they're doing it. That's the interesting thing. No, it's completely unconscious. So we have someone in our family, and I'm not going to mention who it is, but who just, I mean, a really wonderful person, tries so hard, does so well at so many things and does not realize that she actually, like just has this like very dark cloud

sort of following her, looks for the negative and everything. And without really trying, tends to like end up sort of doesn't try to try to be conflict seeking, but causes some conflict with it by this, this constant negativity. Do you know what I'm saying? And so it's, but I can see that it's not intentional. Fortunately, I think because of our training, we can see that it's not intentional, but it can be challenging for people who don't know that. And so it's very important if you or someone you love short attention span, distractibility, disorganization, procrastination, impulse control issues, restless, get assessed because the

treatment that I'm going to do with Jessica, I'm pretty confident if she does what I asked her to do, I'm going to change her life, get it going in the direction that makes her happy, makes her proud of herself. But without it, the consequences of untreated or ineffectively treated ADD are death. They're job failure, school failure, divorce, incarceration. Pregnancy, teenage pregnancy. Pregnancy, more tickets, more accidents, more bankruptcies because of the lack of forethought.

Very negative effect on your self-esteem. And ADD has nothing to do with intelligence that a lot of people they did are super bright but they don't live up to their potential which gives them a really or even people who do okay like i remember being i was pretty successful but i did not realize how hard it was like i thought i was fine i thought it was just an excuse it's nonsense because i was pretty successful um you how hard it was. Like I thought I was fine. I thought ADD was just an excuse. It's nonsense. Cause I was pretty successful. Um, I thought it was ridiculous. Like I thought it was ridiculous. But once, once I realized, you know, Oh, the two pots of coffee aren't normal. Everybody

doesn't do that. Um, or you need to work out for, right. Need to work out for two hours to clear the cobwebs. That's not normal for everybody. Needed to work in, you know, really high stress situations to feel normal. That's not normal. Once I realized and started to really treat it in mostly holistic ways, but, you know, there are times where I take a, I can't really take a stimulant, a traditional one, but there are things you can take that help you stimulate your brain that aren't stimulants. Um, once I understood that I actually didn't realize what my potential was. That's the thing is you don't realize what your potential is until you actually start meeting your potential. So yeah, no, I've written 10 books. All right. One more brain in the news,

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natural ways to heal the brain. I mean, that's really what we want for you. So between light therapy and get your ADHD treated, we hope you found this episode helpful. If you learn something, please write it down, take a picture of it, post it in any of your social media sites. If you go to our sites, we posted a video of me doing an evaluation of 90210 actress Jenny Garth. She came in for memory problems. She's so cute. A gazillion views now. She's really cute. It was really a fun evaluation. So make sure you check that out as well as this is the launch month for the relentless courage of a scared child. You can go to relentless courage.com. If you pre-order or order the book,

I guess by the time this comes out, order the book, there are a whole bunch of downloads that Jana has for you. Bunch of gifts. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast.

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