Change Your Brain Every Day - What You Don’t Know About Traumatic Brain Injuries with Jerri Sher

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen sit down with Emmy Award winning director Jerri Sher to talk about the creative process for her latest film, "Quiet Explosions: Healing The Brain".

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. Hey, everybody. We have a very special week for you. We have a very special friend and a critically important topic. I think traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric problems that nobody knows about. And to help us spread this message, we have award-winning filmmaker, Jerry Short. Jerry is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker, a member of the Director's Guild since 1998. She has completed 22 film and television projects. She wrote, directed,

and produced Quiet Explosions Healing the Brain, a new documentary that's out about traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress in veterans, athletes, and civilians. The film won Best Documentary Feature at the NoHo Cinefest, and the Lilac Award at the spiff uh international film festival was released november 10th 2020 on amazon and vimeo uh by cinema libra studio uh i'm in it some of my patients are in it uh if you haven't seen it, we would just dearly love for you to see it and review it. So hi, Jerry. Welcome. Thank you so much. It's really an honor to be here, Dr. Amen and Tana. Absolutely. So tell us how you got involved in traumatic brain injury as a filmmaker. Well, it's interesting. I'm not a doctor, nor am I a healer. And it's very interesting that somebody contacted me

who knew me when I was 16 years old in Fall River, Massachusetts, believe it or not, when I was a babysitter earning extra money. And this girl, Beth, is an editor for books. And she was working up in Maine and just finished the book by Andrew Marr and Adam Marr, which is Tales from the Blast Factory. And she said she had been following my career my whole life, and I had no idea. And she reached out and said, you know, this book is amazing. And I know you only work on documentaries that's going to help society. I think you should make the movie

of this. So can I put you in touch with this guy? I said, well, you know what, everybody tells me they have the best book. You have to send me the galleys. So I read the galleys. I was very taken with it. And she put me in touch with this guy, Andrew Maher from Texas. He flew right out to see me. And I was leaving on a big trip, actually a big job in Australia and New Zealand in two weeks.

And so he said, I want you to do this. And he looked at my work and he said, you have the rights to the story. So I said, I'll only do it under one condition, Andrew. It has to be a third military, a third athletes, and a third civilians because traumatic brain injury is so important to the universe, not one segment of people. And he said, yes. And our journey began. That's awesome. And how long, yes. And our journey began. That's awesome. And how long did it take you to make the movie?

Three years. Wow. A lot of that time though, was getting the funding in the beginning. So our shooting was about nine months, nine to 12 months. And our post, which is the editing process and everything was about a year. Wow. It is such a powerful movie. Yeah, it's really great. And toward the end of it, you and I connected,

I guess somebody told you about our work and, and it was just so fun to be part of the process. You know, the work we do at Amen Clinics, we've known traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric problems, anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, and nobody knows about it because most psychiatrists actually never look at the brain. And so we were thrilled to be part of it. Can you tell us one or two of the stories in the documentary that meant the most to you? I know we scanned Alan, your husband.

So I know that must have been important. Well, they're all extremely important and special to me because each one is so different and so unique. But I feel so grateful that we interviewed you at the very end of the process, because believe it or not, that was the best way for it to all congeal and come together, especially since you treated Sean Dollar, our surfer who is so dear to me and he's the only

person in the film that had been treated by all three doctors are you and Dr. Gordon and Dr. Sammons and Dr. Cher so and then also the fact that you brought me Anthony Davis who was the running back for the the football NFL, that was very special also. And I think in this process, it's very important that you sort of interview people at the right time in the process. Because if I had interviewed you first, I wouldn't have gotten such a fantastic, magnanimous story.

My favorite person, they're all favorite to me in certain ways, but I'm extremely taken with Ben because he just came to me in a very odd way. And he was a Marine who was ready to kill himself, put the gun in his mouth and said he was going to shoot himself. And then he just saw his mother looking over his grave, which was pretty extraordinary. The fact that my husband got to see you became like a miracle. Alan had surgery when he was 50. So that was like more than two decades ago in 1998

and lost his short-term memory and had all of the exact same symptoms as all the TBI and PTSD guys and girls. You know, he was ready to kill himself because he had no knowledge of his children's names. Everything was gone from being in surgery 12 hours. So they saved his heart, but they really messed up his brain. And this happens to more than 50% of men who have open heart surgery at the age of 55 or less. I was 50.

So when he started working with you and seeing the brain scans, he's gotten better and better and better. So we're very, very grateful. And that's not why I originally made the movie, but it was sort of a bonus for us as a family. Well, when you do good, often good things happen. And I love this because I love what you did, Jerry,

because when you made this about really everybody out there, so we see this all the time and I end up adopting people just because this is what happens, right? When you do what you do, when you do what we do. I have a very similar story where I adopted this kid who was a Marine and had a massive brain injury, watched all three of his friends die at a survival training. Tell me why you're going to survive. Don't I take good care of you? You always say nothing bad can happen. And we just went through a pandemic.

And I have a survival room full of stuff to survive pandemics. So I will never, ever not do this. No. So anyways, I took my daughter to this three day survival training. We were like, you know, we had to build our own shelter and purify our own water and start fires from nothing. It was great. It was great training. Um, but he, he started doing that after it really sort of saved him after being a Marine. And he not only is he, they ran over an IED and his vehicle exploded. He was the only one to survive. He watched his three friends die. And I was hearing his story and he same thing, had a gun in his mouth. And I was just like, you have to come to

the clinic. So we had him come to the clinic and, and long story short, he is now just in this amazing place. His life is thriving. He's married. It's just, you know, it's, it's not, it's possible for this to get better. It's, it's possible for these things to turn around. And these stories are just so heartbreaking. So I just, I hand it to you for, for really making this about everybody and not just those couple of professional athletes. Thank you. Well, you know, I have a wonderful story to tell you, Dr. Amen, that this happened yesterday. I talked to Annie. She is my Navy gal who was from Texas. And she was treated by Dr. Gordon originally. And she was very severe. I mean, the Navy threw her out because she had been raped twice. And they said she was crazy. And they put her in a psych ward. It was a horrific story. She's been on CNN and everything. So she called me yesterday and she told me that she wanted to thank me for putting her in touch with the aiming clinic that just opened in Dallas. And she's on a path now with your clinic. And she said, she's doing so well. And she said to me,

I only wish I had started there. And I'm telling everyone, if you have a problem, start with the Amen Clinic and then go to these other modalities. So I just thought it was very amazing that here I was going to be on your show today. And she called me yesterday to say, please tell Dr. Amen that I'm so grateful that he opened in Dallas and I am now one of the patients. Have her write to me, Jerry. That would be awesome for me to be connected with her.

That's so great. She's got a baby now, 17 months old. Her whole life completely turned around. Our first shoot for this movie was when she got her MBA at the University of Texas in Arlington. We went there to shoot that because I felt like that would be her climax of her story.

And sure enough, that was our very first shoot day. Oh, that's amazing. It's really amazing. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the devastation of not getting this treated. There was just a story in the paper this morning about a former NFL player that murdered five people in South Carolina. And my first thought was the impact of being hit in the head thousands of times. Stay with us. We're going to come back. We're here with Jerry Schur, award-winning filmmaker and the writer, director,

and producer of Quiet Explosions that you can stream now on Amazon or Vimeo. 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. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.