Change Your Brain Every Day - What is Irlen Syndrome & What Causes It? With Helen Irlen

Episode Date: March 5, 2019

If you experience headaches and irritability while reading, or if certain light patterns tend to affect you negatively, you may suffer from the oft-misdiagnosed Irlen Syndrome. Luckily, there are effective methods to treat it. In the second episode of a series on Irlen Syndrome with Helen Irlen, she describes its symptoms, causes, and how it can be remedied.

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're here with Helen Erland. We're having such an interesting conversation about the Erland syndrome. So thanks for being with us, Helen.

I love it. And yeah, this is so much fun. And I just, before we get started on more questions, I actually want to tell you a story because this has been so fascinating for me. And just like when I met Daniel, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. ADD is like nonsense. So I kind of thought the same thing when I heard it because I'm like this neurosurgical hard charging ICU nurse, right? Trauma nurse. So whenever I hear stuff that sounds sort of fluffy to me, I'm like, yeah, whatever.

But I have to tell you a story. What made me a true believer, like a serious believer. So this is so interesting. I just wonder how many other people out there could benefit from this. So my sister, um, we're actually, I, I often say, I joke now it's like, Oh, I finally have a sister on a project. And so she's like, we actually have a relationship now, but I always thought that she was just irresponsible. And it just irritated me because one of my top values is responsibility, right? It's like, you have to take responsibility. And I just felt like, like, what is your problem? Why can't you just be responsible? What is the matter with you? Because she would just do the goofiest things. And she was

so clumsy and she's been in 19 car accidents and she just she would be driving and just drive off the side of the road and flip a car or like go into a ditch or run into something and even when she came to my house she flipped the car with me in it you you had it so yeah and so i mean just it was just non-stop with this kid and so she's nine years younger than i am and she just made me crazy and so she's staying at my house I am. And it just made me crazy. And so she stayed at my house a couple of years ago because a traumatic event happened. And I come outside and she's parked on my curb, like pressed against my mailbox. And I'm like, it just never ends. I'm like, literally going to lose my mind with this girl. Like, I just can't do this anymore. And I'm just

having these thoughts and we're in the car and Daniel's asking, asking her a couple of questions. And I like comment about the car curve and Daniel literally hits the brakes, puts his hand over his mouth. He goes, I know what's wrong. And I go, he goes, I, I feel terrible. I didn't like think of it sooner. He goes, I know what's wrong. And he makes an appointment for her to come see you. And'm like yeah right okay like just i'm like you're just giving her an excuse and because you know i'm mad remember no no that gets worse so yeah part of the problem was she's she literally like part of what was irritating me so badly was and i was trying to figure it all out she thought people were electronically harassing her she thought because, because she would look, she would look if she, if there's fluorescent light going, she started to see laser beams.

And so she, and she, sometimes they'd come from the floor. Sometimes they'd come from the ceiling. Like there were, if it was a hard surface floor, she'd see them bouncing from the floor. And so she thought people were like beginning to harass her electronically. It began to get really weird. And so she would just freak out

and not want to leave the house and she'd stay in the dark. Like she'd keep all the lights off in the house. It just got really weird. And so I'm like, okay, I don't know what to do with this girl. So she comes to see you and it just changed everything. Like I'm like, it literally changed and we don't want to drive yet, but it changed everything. She doesn't see the light beams. She doesn't like, she doesn't have anything. Now she recognizes when we go places, if they have certain lights, she's like, I just can't sit under that light, but I have my glasses on. And now I know that those are not, I know it's from the light. Now.

I don't feel like someone's doing something weird. So is it that a crazy story? I mean, you hear them all the time. All the time. Absolutely. Do you think light pollution is causing more ADD, anxiety, depression with the fluorescent lights? If you want to say light pollution in terms of the amount of time that people are spending on electronic devices absolutely the clients that we see now are so much more severe than they were even 10 years ago they're they're coming in on the severe and i used to say 17 is my high score in terms of how severe you are and a lot of them are coming in at eight is severe 17s was my top and now

they're coming in towards 17 18 19 that makes sense because everything we do is on a computer everything is electronic absolutely and you're under fluorescent lights that have gotten brighter and brighter so they're under their most adverse environment trying to function and they don't realize it. And so it can affect them at work. It can affect them in school. It can affect them in their home. It's amazing. So if you suspect that this might apply to you or someone you love, erlen.com is just a great resource for you. There are self tests. Actually, when I'm in my office and I'm sort of suspecting this, I actually go to the website

and I do the short tests and I go, so how many of these 14 symptoms do you have? And it's often people have eight or nine or 12 of these symptoms. And I'm like, and I had this one girl from Oklahoma and, um, she'd been diagnosed with ADD and anxiety and the medication helped, but not as much as we had thought. And she had terrible. Um, but it would make you anxious.

And when we got it treated, she actually saw her mother's whole face for the first time. That's crazy. Isn't that? No, I hear all this. You've all heard this story. I hear it all the time. So I have to say something, though.

Think about this. If you are seeing light beams coming at you or you think you're being electronically harassed or you can't read and you're in law school, that's going to cause some serious anxiety or depression. Absolutely. And you're trying as hard as you can. And the harder you try, the worse things get. So then what do you do? Right? I brought in, if you think of an optical illusion, and I brought an example of an optical illusion, because that's what's happening to the brain. Basically for my clients, the world becomes like an optical illusion for them. Oh, wow. And people don't even think, should I show one of these? Yes. So yeah. So those of you listening, you won't see the optical illusion, but we also record this and you can see it on YouTube. So there's this swirl pattern. At least that's what I see. Yeah. And things can happen or change. Things can flicker or flash or shimmer.

Things can move up and down. Things can blurry. Things can disappear and reappear. And so you're getting this happening, though, all the time. And the only way you can make it stop happening is to stop reading or copying or get out from under the fluorescent lighting. So you have to get away from it and then you get labeled. And the labels can vary from ADD to just not trying hard enough to you need to pay more attention. And the kids just blame themselves because if they look at a page that looks like an optical illusion and they look at

their neighbor's page it looks exactly the same so the issue is one of well they're seeing it just like i'm seeing it then there must be something wrong with me um and the other thing you and i talked about is how we just assume a lot of the things we experience as normal like reading is supposed to put you to sleep. Right. Right? You told me you were sorry about that. I read to go to sleep.

Yeah. And how many out there read to go to sleep without realizing it, that there are people who can read for hours and hours and hours and never get tired or never get sleepy. Another comment that I hear a lot is, well, of course, everyone's going to get a headache. They just need to read long enough. And then you look around, and the majority of the population doesn't get headaches from reading. So they're assuming that it's their problem,

and they don't even need to report it or tell anyone, and nobody asks them. I mean, no one asked them. There's not one test in school or psychoeducational battery that asks questions about how it feels. So how do people get this? What causes it? Two ways. One, you can inherit it. So it doesn't surprise me when you talked about reading puts you to sleep knowing that your sister's severe you may not be as severe on the continuum so you inherit it and that's fun because we always talk to the children and say well we're going to find out if you have erlin who you inherited from whether it's your mom dad or both and that just immediately makes them feel better it goes, it's not my fault, right? Mom goes, I know, it's probably my fault.

But either way, or you can acquire it through head injuries, concussions, whiplash, or certain even medical conditions that are autoimmune related, and certain medications that make you more light sensitive. It can be one or both. In terms of the concussions and TBIs, we're seeing a lot of workman's comp cases who have had auto accidents or accidents at work. And we worked with 500 of our military men and women who have been over in Iraq and Afghanistan and experienced multiple blast injuries and have been living with a headache every minute of every day that become migraines once a day to twice a day with the nauseous and dizziness. And they're all getting medically discharged and they have families to support. They can't go back to school

because they can't be under fluorescent lighting. They can't read any longer. And we get them in the lenses and it changes their lives. And that's what I hear from every one of them. You've changed my life. Wow. I don't suffer anymore from headaches or migraines or eye pain or eye strain. I'm able to read and I think, and I have a future. Anger is another interesting issue. I had a mother as we do pre and post and we do follow-ups and I was talking to one of the Marines and I asked about anger and his wife grabbed the phone away from him and said, Helen, I need to tell you his anger was so bad that I would take the children and have to hide in a closet to protect us and the children. She said, since he's been wearing his own spectral filters, we haven't been able to hide in a closet to protect us and the children. She said, since he's been wearing his oral inspection filters,

we haven't been able to hide. We don't need to be in the closet at all anymore. So I want to thank you. All right, stay with us. When we come back, we're going to talk about traumatic brain injury and the Irland syndrome. 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.

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