Change Your Brain Every Day - What Are The Spiritual Causes of Suicide?

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

No matter what religion or philosophy you subscribe to, spirituality can give your life a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. In the fourth and final episode of “Suicide Awareness Week,” Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen discuss the spiritual factors that play a role in depression and suicide, and how believing in something larger than yourself can help to get you through troubled times.

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. We are on our last episode of Suicide Awareness Week. So what are we talking about for this last episode? We're talking about the social and the spiritual connections. There you go. All right. So we talked about social. So is there a spiritual component? Oh, I would think there must be. To suicide. And so I already told you, growing up Catholic, I'm not above using guilt.

And there's actually studies on people who have near-death experiences. So, I mean, there are thousands of people who've reported what happens to them in that interim between death and coming back. And they're all similar. Where they see the light. Well, they're all similar except for people who kill themselves. For people who have suicide attempts. And for them, generally, the research is not pleasant

that what they see in that interim state is Dante's fourth stage of hell. Oh, I've never heard that. Where they see their problems go over and over and over again. And so I, for all of my patients, I want to know why are you on the earth? What is your sense of meaning and purpose? And some people think we're just here by random chance

and that our life has no meaning, that we evolved out of the amoeba from the Big Bang explosion and that there is no intelligent design. There is no God. So it seems like it would be a little easier to kill yourself if that's what you believe. If your life is painful and... Unless you've got really strong social connections.

See, it's really easy to kill yourself if your brain's not right, your mind is infested with ants, you're lonely, and you have no spiritual connection. Right. The things that prevent suicide is you have and you care about your brain, you love your brain, we call it brain envy around here, that your mind is accurate and clean in its thoughts, it's not loaded with ants, that you're connected socially to other people, and you have a deep sense of meaning and purpose.

So we talked about, I mentioned this briefly in one of the other episodes that when I was really, really depressed, the reason I didn't contemplate suicide, my biology was a mess. My psychology was a mess. But I had my mom that I worried about. But I also grew up very Christian in that that's the one unforgivable sin, right? That's the one thing you can't do. And so. I don't know that suicide is the but that's what you're talking about yes that is what you're taught okay so we're not here to debate that that's what i believed

right so i believed that that thought and so my spiritual beliefs at the time really kept me like oh you can't you can't even start to think that you You can't go there. You've got to do something else. Right, and as Catholic, growing up Catholic, it was very frowned upon. Right, and so my point being that your spiritual beliefs can make that difference. No question. Having a deep sense of meaning and purpose. And I'm really curious, for those of you that are listening,

what do you think happens to you when you're dead? Do you think it's all darkness? That's a good question. Or do you think that there's more? But then I start to get really sad because I think, what about the people who are mentally ill? What if you are schizophrenic? What if you have had a bad head injury? that makes me really sad because so let's talk about our friend Byron Katie so we both love her she's amazing she wrote a book called loving what is she teaches seminars around the world and before she had her spiritual awakening and for her it wasn't Christianity. It was... She's more Buddhist type of...

Well, but it was really... So she was a nut. She was a nut. She was a nut. She was a rager. She was in a halfway house. She had an eating disorder. She was an alcoholic. She... She woke up in a halfway house with a roach crawling across her foot when she had this revelation. Right. And she realized, this is in 1986 in Barstow, where I actually lived for two years.

She woke up at a halfway house and realized that when she believed her thoughts, she suffered. And when she didn't believe her thoughts, she didn't suffer. Because she realized her thoughts were ridiculous, like they're tainted. And which is part of the psychological circle but then she got so motivated to share the epiphany that she had and became a best-selling author and an amazing seminar leader and this is a purposeful girl. And when I scanned her after I had met her, her brain looked terrible. I'm like, you know, if you kill someone, I could probably get you off death row because her brain was that bad. That's a terrible thing to say.

I thought it was an awesome thing to say. But she wasn't suicidal and was one of the most peaceful people that I've met because her psychological circle was good, her social circle was good, and her spiritual circle was amazing. So even though she had bad biology, because of her sense of meaning and purpose, she was no more going to kill herself than I would. And that's what we want you to hear. That, you know, I think what you brought up in the last one is so important because 20% of teenage girls meet the criteria for major depression. That we have had a dramatic increase in suicide across the United States over the last two decades.

Why? Because it's all about me. It's all about social media and how I compare to this person or that person. And it's not about what good can I do in the world for other people? It's how do I compare to the Kardashians that determine whether or not I want to live or die? And that is so toxic. And we haven't really touched on the epidemic thing. Why does it become an epidemic?

Why do these kids— In large part, it's just what you said when you were dealing with the girl you were talking about. It's social media. It's a lack of purpose. Not to mention, birth control pills deplete serotonin. But it's not always girls. Increasing the risk of depression.

But it's more, it's twice as much in girls as it is in boys. So this is an interesting statistic we haven't talked about. The girls actually attempt to kill themselves way more than guys. Oh, interesting. It's like four times as much as guys. But guys actually kill themselves twice as much as girls. Because guys tend to not cry for help. And they choose more lethal.

And they choose more violent means. Right. Or girls more likely to overdose. But do you think that the way that we, I know we've got one study that says this, but I want to know from your experience. The way that the media portrays it or the way that we, it's on social media now when kids kill themselves. Does it almost glamorize it? Or is it because if there's a kid, now that we've got so much social media, if someone's having those thoughts already and then they see it over and over again that someone's done it, does it reinforce, oh,

I should do that too? Like what is the reason that it happens in epidemics? Well, you've heard me say that people are contagious, right? Just holding the hand of your partner, holding the hand of your partner, you begin to take on their breathing rate, their heart rate, even their brainwave patterns, right? People are contagious. And so if you're watching, so you follow this celebrity

and that celebrity kills themselves there's a part of you that's relating to them and you're like oh well maybe I will go out in that kind of blaze of glory or if you see someone like the kid who killed himself at the high school that my daughter used to go to and he left a bunch of letters and you see all the attention that got right or or it's already been in your head. And your brain, because suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in all of us. It's the second leading cause of death in teenagers behind car accidents.

So if you're already contemplating it. And you don't have your frontal lobes fully developed. And the front part of your brain is things like empathy forethought judgment impulse control but you're beginning to see if i do this it's going to affect my mom this way it's going to affect my dad this way it'll affect my siblings it'll affect my friends my co-workers because suicide you know damages everybody in its wake, right? I've just seen that over and over again. But having a sense of meaning and purpose,

that's why if those of you listening haven't read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Oh, my gosh. It's so heavy and so good. It's so special. Yeah. And in my new book, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last, I write a lot about some of the main principles that Dr. Frank- Well, we did a podcast with someone who worked with his organization and

knew him personally. With Jeff Zeig, yeah. Yeah, it's so amazing. That book is just, I remember reading that book a long time ago. It's a great book. Great book. So if you want to prevent suicide in yourself or in your kids or in your community, let's not make it just a simple answer like stop playing video games. Although, stop playing video games. Get off social media so much. There are biological factors like head trauma or even vitamin deficiencies. A B12 deficiency is associated with depression and psychosis. There's psychological factors like believing every stupid thing you think.

There's social factors hanging around with people who have that kind of behavior or people who bully you or ostracize you. And there are spiritual factors and intervening in any one of those circles can help prevent suicide. Intervening in all four of the circles really helps to get you well. You know what, just to end this, one last thing I wanted to share is one of our favorite family movies we watched like probably eight times, Soul Surfer. I love the story of Bethany Hamilton and how she lost

her arm in a shark, you know, she's a surfer and she lost her arm in a shark attack. And she went through this really hard time of recovering and sort of getting herself back and she became depressed. But what she did is she went and she went on a mission trip to Thailand and she helped people much less fortunate and it really shifted her thinking, right? So she did that thing that's bigger than herself. She got out of her own head. She went and saw and helped people who were suffering. And I love the part of the movie where she says,

I don't need easy, I just need possible. It might not be easy, but there's hope out there. It's possible, right? So one of the best ways to help yourself is to go help others. Stay with us. Use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast.

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