Change Your Brain Every Day - Suicide: The Ones Who Are Left Behind

Episode Date: October 31, 2017

It’s often the ones left to pick up the pieces after a traumatic event like suicide who experience the most pain. Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen take a look at how suicide affects others, and ways to break the cycle of suffering.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the 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 nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back, everyone. We've been silly on this podcast. Today, we're going to be really serious. We're going to talk about suicide and the impact it has on loved ones. And some of you know, you know, I talk about how I grew up Catholic, like my mother was not kidding about the whole thing. And I went to Catholic school. So I'm actually really good with guilt. And whenever I have a suicidal patient, I just let them know if you kill yourself

you actually are increasing the risk your children will kill themselves it's a 500% increased risk and that's so I often talk to my patients about this is a permanent solution to what is usually a temporary feeling. And so it's not uncommon. 55% of the US population at some point in their life have thought about killing themselves. So if you've had the thought, it's actually pretty normal um attempting suicide females actually attempt suicide four times more than males but males are four times more effective because they tend to use more violent extreme means um the suicide sometimes, oftentimes is related to depression, but not always, often also related to head injuries. So I actually, this was actually something requested by a couple of people. We had a couple of people write in and ask us to talk about this topic

because when someone commits suicide, itates families it devastates the people left behind and they don't know how to deal with it so we want to talk about how to deal with it if you've had someone that's committed suicide in your family and this happened when i was a little girl this happened with someone very close to me at the time in my family her sister committed suicide and it turned the entire family upside down um the way that they didn't have the tools to deal with it very effectively and it really turned everything upside down um and it affected the family going forward for a couple generations so i think this is a really important topic and i mean according to psychology today in the U S alone, suicide deaths are the 10th leading cause of

death overall, which is pretty amazing. It means that something's going wrong with people getting treatment. And it's not changed. We've not made any impact on that in the last 35 years since I've been a psychiatrist and suicide is the second leading cause of death in teenagers. It's crazy. And the issue is that the bereavement, the grief caused by the people left behind after suicide is very different than when it is caused by, as tragic as it is, if it's a car accident or cancer or whatever,

it's different. Well, of course, because the perception is my child or my spouse or my parent chose to abandon me. Right. And if it's a child and their parents do it, it's even worse. Because the idea is, because they're not looking at it through the lens of neuroscience like you and I do, it's they chose to hurt me. They chose to leave me. Or it's my fault. Or it's my fault that they left me.

Children tend to see through that lens. Well, when you're small, you see yourself at the center of the world. So if something really good happens in your family, you think it's sort of because of you. And if something bad happens, you think it's because of you. When odds are it didn't have anything to do with you. Right. It was either a head injury, mental illness. It was addiction. It was, you know, some other...

Or someone got diagnosed with a terminal illness and they decided to kill themselves rather than fight through it. That is not an uncommon way that in, you know, when we even call it euthanasia, but often people, you know, will decide not to suffer. So there are stages of grief too, that I think if you see someone going through this and you understand it, it can make it easier because people will tend to be in shock and then they withdraw. And if they withdraw from you, um, what happens, but sometimes people go sideways. Like I remember the person I'm thinking of, um, kind of went off the rails and no one

really knew what to do. And I, this is where I think the,ry and your industry, your practice in general has let people down. And I'm just being very honest. My practice? Not my practice. Not your practice. Your discipline. Right. Has let people down.

Well, because they never look at the brains of people who are suffering. Right. And I've actually published two studies on suicide. And what we find is people who attempt suicide, or even later complete suicide, have lower function in the front part of their brain. And we talk about it a lot on this show, but the prefrontal cortex is the most human part of the brain it's involved it's 30 of the human brain 11 of the chimpanzee brain seven percent of your dog's brain although sometimes you might not think that with aslan um he's smarter three percent of the cat's brain um he's definitely smarter but it's involved with really important human functions like forethought and empathy and forward and so if you have less

forethought and you have less empathy you can kill yourself without thinking right you can't think about what impact impact that it will have on other people. So what are the differences between the grieving person from a tragic accident or an illness versus losing someone versus when someone they love commits suicide? And how do they deal with it? Well, it's because of their perception of what happened. I mean, both of them are devastating. And grief, you know, you live in every fun place in my head, right? And so if you would die, my brain would actually start looking for you,

and it would start firing up, and I would end up sad, obsessed, have trouble letting go of those bad thoughts. That's part of the grieving process. But if you decided to check out and leave, then my perception would be if I didn't know what I know is you chose to leave. So there's anger now too. Well, there's disappointment. There's recrimination on the person themselves. If I would have done something different, I mean, you hear that all the time. I should have seen it.

I should have done this or that. Right. I should have protected. And the fact is, and what I tell everybody is, you know, we choose. You can't choose for other people. And sometimes the illness wins. And so typically someone's been struggling with bipolar disorder, with depression, with an addiction. And often suicide happens when someone's been drinking because they've sort of had the thought, but their frontal lobes, forethought, empathy,

have been protecting them from acting out that bad behavior. But what the alcohol does is it takes away the break, and they act on what likely is a temporary feeling. Now, is that why sometimes if they're prescribed the wrong medication or the wrong antidepressant, the same thing can happen? Right. If they start with low frontal lobe function and we put them on an SSRI like Lexapro or Prozac or Zoloft or Celexa and drop their frontal lobes, what we are doing is disinhibiting them and then they act on any thought they have without appropriate supervision. Yeah, I got to tell you, when I was highly, just horribly depressed, it's when shortly after Prozac came out and I went to the doctor and they didn't know I mean

they were just like prescribing whatever was new they put me on Prozac and I remember feeling like I didn't care about anything now fortunately I was aware enough to know this isn't me this isn't me I don't normally not care about anything like something's not right thank god I wasn't suicidal but I just didn't care about anything and I didn't the thought of consequences Thank God I wasn't suicidal, but I just didn't care about anything. And I didn't, the thought of consequences wasn't, I wasn't even able to sort of think like that, but I was able to go, this isn't me and something's not right. And I took myself off of it. But I remember- Even though the doctor wanted to double it.

He wanted to double it because he's like, when I said something's not right, he goes, well, we need to double the dose crazy and if you do it without looking you know it's one of the reasons we started our nfl study here in 2007 because a lot of football players were killing themselves and they did it in the nfl way of killing themselves so they'd shoot themselves in the chest so that they could donate their brain to science and i'm like well why don't we scan your brain while you're alive and see if we can fix it that way? And, you know, we scanned and treated over 200 players. But we found in our football players they had four times the level of depression as the general population. And I remember one of my players who I dearly loved, Fred McNeil,

who played for UCLA and then he played for the Vikings and then became a lawyer. But he became suicidal because his dementia was starting to take over his brain. He couldn't do the work and he knew he was headed

for the dark place. The dark place is terrible. We helped him so much by helping to rehabilitate his brain and treat his depression. And that's often what people who kill themselves don't understand, is that depression and other mood disorders are highly treatable when you do the right thing for them. But here at Amen Clinics, we want to look at your brain so that we target treatment to your brain than target treatment to an illness.

I have to say something here because people get frustrated when they think that there's only one solution if they call our clinic. There's only one solution and they maybe can't afford that one solution and it's not true. So if you know someone who's struggling, this isn't a sales pitch. This is a call out to you if you know somebody, um, because I know how tragic this is. If you know someone who really needs help, um, I would encourage you if it's not here, it's somewhere you need to reach out to somebody. Um, this is a tragedy. Please reach out to someone and get some help. But we have multiple, multiple ways to help you.

So I would suggest. Right. But it starts with the map. It does. And that's, you know, why I became obsessed with imaging 26 years ago. If you don't look, you just don't know. And we had this great experience last Saturday. 26 years ago. If you don't look, you just don't know. And we had this great experience last Saturday.

We're going to an engagement party for my nephew. I know. And it turned out he got married, which was really awesome, right? But this is Andrew. Some of you have heard me talk before. When Andrew was nine years old, he attacked a little girl on the baseball field that day. And I'm like, oh, my God, what else is going on with him? And she said, Danny, he's different. He's mean.

He doesn't smile anymore. And I went into his room, and I found two pictures he had drawn. One of them, he was shooting other children. The other picture, he was hanging from a tree. So he had both homicidal thoughts, suicidal thoughts. And when we scanned him, he had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying the space of his left temporal lobe. And when they took this cyst out, his behavior went completely back to normal. Now, was he a bad boy?

No, he was an awesome boy. People who have bad thoughts often have brain dysfunction that no one has uncovered. And one of the reasons I love our work so much is people say, if only my dad would have gotten scanned, then he wouldn't have been so mean or he wouldn't have been so difficult. This at least helps me understand so I can forgive him. Right. That happened to me. I can't take it so personally. Right. So you're listening to The Brain Warrior's Way.

Suicide, remember, it's a permanent solution to a temporary feeling or problem. Ask for help when you need it. If your family has been affected by that, try to understand at least in, it's a brain issue and that with the right treatment, we can help prevent it going forward. Stay with us. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review, and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of The Brain Warrior's Way and The Brain Warrior's Way cookbook we give away every month.