Change Your Brain Every Day - Can You Heal Mental Illnesses with Medication Alone?

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen answer more of your listener questions. This episode tackles such diverse topics as treating mental illness with medication, the role of routines in treating illnesses, exercise and bipolar disorder, acquired borderline personality disorder, and chronic mental illnesses.

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 so grateful that you are listening. This podcast has now been downloaded just about 7 million times. I know, it's so cool. And we are grateful. Pay attention and try to learn one new thing.

Yeah. And then post it on any of your social media sites. We'll be so grateful. And then leave us a question, a comment, or a review, and we'll enter you into a raffle to win either one of our books, the Brain Warriors Way cookbook or the end of mental illness. But go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com and let us know your question or your comment.

And do you have some reviews to read? I do. From Amanda, I was absolutely shocked at the percentage rates, especially with suicide. That's amazing how food can affect suicide and reduce it by eating the right types of food. By the way, I'm loving how Dr. Raymond is changing the stigma

by rewording mental illness into brain health. Love that. And then another one from RegGuy44. I'm learning how to use my frontal cortex. These videos really help. Our family is fixing our thinking and not letting emotions control

our decisions and actions. Only when appropriate. Accountability. I love both of those. accountability i love accountability yes that's great send them a book fun i am grateful okay so in this podcast we are going to answer your questions and i want you to help me with this the first one is can i stabilize my mental illness simply with medication alone well one you know i hate the term mental illness simply with medication alone. Well, one, you know I hate the term mental illness because it's stigmatizing, it's inaccurate. And these are brain health issues that steal your mind.

And I'm just not a fan of medication is the first and only thing you do. Because it's giving control to a substance without you having to do anything. And sometimes medication saves people's lives, right? I mean, you take thyroid and that's really critical. I'm not getting out of it. But you also do the other things to keep your thyroid gland healthy. Well, and I do the other things to prevent cancer from coming back.

And I do the other things to prevent depression from coming back. And I know what it's like to go through that scary, dark thing. I know, you know, the things that go bump in the night. So why would I want to go back to that? So I do what I can on my side to prevent it.

And that's why. Well, and there's another question here. Does exercise help control bipolar disorder? So many people who really have bipolar disorder, we actually did a blog on how I think bipolar is the fad diagnosis of 2020. ADD in adults was the fad diagnosis of 2000. I mean, there's always a fad diagnosis. I think a lot of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder really have the chronic effects of traumatic brain injury. And that mood instability,

irritability, temper problems, not bipolar, they damage their temporal lobes. But exercise virtually helps everything. Exercise helps ADD. It helps depression. It helps anxiety. Is there one thing it really doesn't help? No. for me, I mean, it helps mood for me. And I mean, you know how I get if I'm not exercising, I just get a little agitated. But part of that is that fear for me, because I know what it's like to be depressed. And it's like, I'm so anxious about going backwards. And it's been 25, 27 years now. But I just there's always in the back of my mind,

like if I don't do this, I'm going to go backwards. And so I'm just always like on top of it. So you do it because you love yourself. And it feels good when I do it. And you love your husband and you love your family. And I feel good when I do it. The next question, I have a really hard time making a routine for myself.

How does someone with a mental illness make a routine for themselves? So I'm going to push, I mean, you're going to have the medical term for that. But from a coaching perspective, I'm going to push on that a little bit. Because I would say, just like when people say they don't have, they're not motivated, I would say you are motivated. You're motivated to do something, even if it's sit on the couch and eat hot Cheetos. You're motivated to do something. So my question is, you have a routine. The question is, what is your routine?

Is your routine sporadic? Is it chaotic? Is it that you do have a routine, but your routine isn't what you want? Because you do have a routine. So once you identify what your routine is, now we can begin to, like, alter it, right? You do have a routine. Well, it starts. I really like that because, you know, people are eating crappy food or they're not exercising.

That's their routine. That is their routine. And often it just starts with changing one thing, like walking like you're late. Right. Or starting the day with today is going to be a great day or ending the day with what went well today. Or just getting your shoes and putting them out,

your walking shoes, knowing that you're more likely to go walking if you take your shoes out. So for some people, some people like me are more like I need to jump the canyon. I need to like I need massive change all at once. Like they're like me and they want to do it all at once. And if they don't do it all at once, they feel like it wasn't a big enough shift. OK, but there are that's like a small percentage, I think, of people who are making changes. I think most people are probably that was a hard thing for me to learn when I was coaching.

I just do it. Just do it all. Like it was hard for me to sort of get why people weren't doing it all. But I started to learn. Anybody ever call you intense? Intense, yeah. So I started to learn that most people learn differently. And if you're going to help people change, you have to learn how they learn and begin to understand how people learn. And most people learn in small steps.

That tiny habits, that really struck me when we worked with people from Stanford on the tiny habits project. So sometimes you've got gotta chunk it down so small and that is what works. So it really doesn't matter if you cross the canyon in one leap or if you cross the canyon by walking down one side and up the other side. It really doesn't matter as long as you get to the other side, right?

So if you are a person who does it in tiny, tiny steps, that's okay. Just take that first tiny step. And I would suggest mastering that one tiny thing for a week before you pick the next thing. Pick something that you know you will do. Even if it is, get your tennis shoes out and set them by the front door.

Even if it's that small and you have to look at them every single day. Put your tennis shoes by the front door and put a little sticky note on your front door, I will walk. Like do that every day for a week. And then the next day, the next week. Yeah, because if people start to do one thing,

ultimately you do two things. And if you do two, you're probably going to do four. And it starts with, is this good for my brain or bad for it? It just starts with that simple question that we talk about all the time. Because once you start, you begin to feel better. What did you used to say? Give me two weeks. Just give me two weeks. Just give me two weeks. It's not because you're only

going to do it for two weeks. It's because in two weeks, people begin to feel so much better. Their pain goes down. They sleep better. Everything begins to shift and then they get it. And then they start to, they want to do it. How does someone acquire borderline personality disorder? I would love to know that actually. So borderline personality disorder, people who have pretty severe mood instability, irritability. They tend to overvalue people. Oh, Dr. Eamon, you're the best doctor that ever lived. And then whenever someone says that, I'm like, uh-oh. What's coming next? Because three weeks later, it's like, you are the worst doctor.

But don't they also lie a lot? They can. And they can be involved in... Pretty extreme behavior. Extreme behavior, extreme sexual behavior. Temper problems. Yeah, I've had someone in my life that... They can be tough to deal with.

The causes, sometimes it's early abandonment causes. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a head injury. Sometimes it's because they had toxic exposure. Sometimes they had a brain infection. And clearly something is the matter with their brains. So it's not always like a bonding. We've treated hundreds of people with borderline personality disorder here,

and they don't all have the same brain, but typically they have low frontal lobe activity, it's the impulsivity. Low activity, often in their left temporal lobe, dark, evil, awful thoughts, mood instability, irritability, temper problems. And their cingulate gyrus works too hard, so they're rigid and flexible. And if things don't go their way, they get upset. So you have that impulse of compulsive mood instability. And often I have found mood stabilizers to stabilize their temporal lobes can be really helpful. And then either medicine or supplements to increase both serotonin and dopamine have been... Because these are people that can be really frustrating.

So if you're trying to be in a relationship or it's someone in your family, it can be pretty frustrating. It can be really painful for people. Is mental illness a chronic disorder and can it be cured the end of mental illness the end of mental illness begins with a revolution in brain health so let's talk about your grandmother for a minute because people would say she had a mental illness and i never i never agreed she was diagnosed with schizophrenia i wasn't I wasn't in the medical industry. She was hospitalized. Yeah, she was hospitalized, given electric shock therapy.

And it's funny because I grew up with her 20-something years of my life. She lived in our house, and I wasn't in the medical industry at the time, but then eventually I became a nurse and it never resonated with me. People called her schizophrenic. And I'm like,

I don't see it. She never heard voices. She never acted weird, but she did act. I mean, she never acted like she was schizophrenic, like she would like walk around, like talking to her. She never did that. So I'm like, I don't understand why they're calling her schizophrenic.

Even when I was young, I didn't understand why they said that. She did have issues. Like she had, when her blood sugar went low, cause I had to give her her insulin shots. Whoa, if her blood sugar went low, she would act crazy her her insulin shots whoa her blood sugar went low she would act crazy but guess what that's a sign of like what oh she'd start screaming and like but that is a sign of low blood sugar so she would go a little crazy if she if her blood sugar wasn't stabilized so is that a mental illness or is that a brain that's a medical issue it's a medical issue so and then the other the other thing that

happened though is she would hibernate in her room and she became a hoarder and if you saw this you might call it a mental illness but if you knew the backstory you would not so she became a hoarder and she would watch tv and cry all day and so people started to think she was crazy but if you understood the backstory you would understand why she did those two things so share a little bit of it so she was um she. So she was Lebanese, but at the time, Greater Syria. And she was born in 1910. So in 1915, she went through the Great Famine. So I guess it was 1915, 1918, something like that.

But she went through the Great Famine when she was a child. And so she would watch the Turks come through with their weapons. And it was a terrible time in that country. So it was war-torn country, and she was traumatized. They had no food. It was the Great Famine. And they were starving. And so her only punishment at one point

was to kneel on a marble floor all day because she ate a loquat that was her sister's. And they had no food, and that was the only food they had. But because it was so serious that for eating something when she was hungry, she got punished. And so at one point, they had to run. The Turks were coming through town. Everybody scattered. Everybody ran.

She ran up into the mountains. She was five years old, and she got lost in the mountains for three days by herself. And so it was freezing cold. This is when the moisture would turn to frost. And so the small amounts, like the little puddles on the ground would freeze and things like that. It was freezing cold.

And so she was lost for three days by herself and she bent down to drink out of a pond and her hair got in the water and it froze. And so she was terrified of the animals, of everything. She's by herself. She finally, someone finds her, takes her back into town and they had to like shave her head close to her, her hair close to her head and to get it was all matted and, you know, tangled and whatever. And so she was completely traumatized. She never got over that. And then my uncle was murdered when she, in a drug deal when I wasized. She never got over that. And then my uncle was murdered in a drug deal when I was four,

and she never got over that. And in America, she never learned to speak the language. So is that a mental illness? Right, she also had a language barrier. Were there cultural issues, clearly? There's trauma issues, clearly. And the hoarding was, she used to tell me, save the old tinfoil. Save it.

Save, you know, save the butter dishes because you don't know. Something's going to happen. Something's going to happen sometime. Which is trauma. Right. And trauma is just so common in our society. So is it chronic? Can it be cured?

You have to know the cause. But I didn't think of her as crazy. That's why I wrote The End of Mental Illness. We need to see these as brain health issues. And your brain is an organ, just like your heart is an organ. And your brain often can heal if you put it in a healing environment. We are so grateful for you. If you learned one thing, please post it on any of your social media channels. Like,

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