Change Your Brain Every Day - Why Was Andrew Drawing Pictures of Himself Hanging From a Tree?

Episode Date: April 5, 2018

He had always been a happy and sweet kid, so when nine-year-old Andrew suddenly attacked a girl on the baseball field for no apparent reason, something was clearly wrong. But no one, not even his mother, could have ever anticipated what would happen next. In this special episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen tell the amazing and heartwarming story of how young Andrew’s life was changed forever.

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. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Welcome back, everybody. So I want to actually talk about something kind of fun and different today. I keep getting calls from people I know and texts about this video that's going around. It's like seriously viral. It's got like 37 million views or something crazy now. 38 million views now. And it's my husband.

Wow. It's a little weird. It's a little bit weird. Did it embarrass you? No, it was super cool. It was actually really sexy. So it's really cool when your husband like goes viral like that. It's kind of awesome. So let's talk about it. Because I've heard the story a lot of times. And here's what's so interesting. This is why I thought it was so interesting. I've heard the story a lot. I've heard you tell a story a lot. I've heard it in presentations. But for some reason, this video went viral. Like, I don't know what makes things go viral. But when I watched it, I think it's because you didn't know you were

actually being videotaped. Someone got it on their phone and just posted it. And so I think you were not, this wasn't like your TED Talk where it was more formal. It was just you sort of raw emotion telling the story of Andrew, who is your godson or nephew. And it was... I get teary just thinking about telling the story. But that's what happened. You were more raw and natural and you didn't know that it was going to be posted like that. Yeah. And there's a context to it

that most people don't know. When we first started doing our brain imaging work here at Amen Clinics in 1991, I was so excited. I was just like a little kid. You know,

I had a new tool. I had a study to help be a better doctor. I didn't make five cents on it. I just got really excited about it. So let me back up because you – doctors pretty much – psychiatrists pretty much guess up until this point. And now you're like, oh, wait a second. I actually get to look at the brain.

I get to have more targeted treatment. You weren't doing them in the clinics at the time, so you were sending people out to have them done. You were just excited that now you could actually be way more specific about treatment. Right. Okay. And so I was an x-ray technician when I was in the army. So this made sense. And our professors just always say, how do you know unless you look? And then when I fell in love with psychiatry for so many reasons, I fell in love with the only medical specialty that virtually never looks at the organ they treat. And I just knew that was wrong, that we needed more biological information because stigma is so high among people who have mental health problems.

No one wants to be labeled as crazy or defective. And that first lecture, I mean, I just remember it like it was yesterday. I was like smiling inside. And I walked out of the lecture to a woman's room. She'd just been admitted the night before and she tried to kill herself. And I thought I knew what was going on with her, but she wouldn't cooperate. And I'm saying, well, can we look at your brain? And when she saw her brain, she started to cry and she said, you mean it's not my fault. Something that we actually hear a lot.

So for the first couple of years, I mean, I got really excited about it. And by 1991, I was writing a column in the local newspaper. I'd already written a couple of books. I had a big national book published in 1992. And so I had my own platform. And so because you have your own platform, when you say something that's new and different or in this case radical. It's like a target on your back.

Looking at the brain before you actually go about changing it, radical. I got all sorts of criticism. And I was not good at dealing with that. It made me mad and it made me anxious. And I didn't really know how to deal with the criticism. And then... I just want to interject one thing. Because when I met you, and we'll go back to that. But when I met you, because I know how the industry, the medical community in general, thinks of psychiatry.

It's like, you know, yeah, you guys guess. And so there tends to be this, you know, it's not, it's not a secret. I almost canceled my first date with you when I found out you were a psychiatrist. It's not a secret. So, you know, there's just this, this idea that they do things differently. Right. So, but I had worked for a company called Medtronic. So Medtronic did, and one of the therapies that I worked with was called deep brain stimulation, DBS. So really interesting. We had to learn, you know, we actually worked with the brain mapping.

So before they do DBS, they do brain mapping. So when I first met you, our first date, I thought, okay, I'm just going to get through the state. I'm going to be really polite and I'm going to leave. And, but it didn't go that way. Cause when I first met you, you started talking about scans. And I'm like, wait, that's so interesting. Because with brain mapping, I knew exactly what you were talking about. And I'm like, you're sort of looking at the brain, mapping it almost. It is a map.

But it made sense. And I'm like, what? And then right after I met you, I wanted to map your brain because I really liked you. But my first question was- I didn't want to like you if your brain was messed up. But my first question was, why aren't all psychiatrists doing this? So in my mind, it made complete sense. Which has been my question from the moment I ordered scans. But if you go back to 1995, people were calling me a charlatan and a quack, and I'm taking advantage of mentally ill people by charging the money to look at the brain even though in 1995 and this story actually doesn't take place in my office I sent yeah you weren't even getting the money for it right anyways so all that context to say it was an

anxious time for me loved what I did I did. We were beginning to see people from all over Northern California where our first clinic was. And then late one night in April, 1995, I got a call from my sister-in-law, Sherry, who told me that my nine-year-old nephew, Andrew, who's also my godson, I love this boy, had attacked a little girl on the baseball field that day for no particular reason. Horrified, I asked Sherry,

I said, excuse me, what else is going on? And she said, Danny, he's different. He's mean. He doesn't smile anymore. And I went into his room today and found two pictures he had drawn. One of them, he was hanging from a tree. The other picture, he was shooting other children. Andrew, in retrospect, was Columbine. Right. Or Sandy Hook or Parkland, Florida waiting to happen. Right. You know, it's as a mom, you know, with a child in school and many people listening to this are moms with kids in school. We've seen kids like this, right? We know kids like this and we get scared and we don't want our kids playing with these kids. Now I have a different framework.

But it's, you know kids like this and you have to wonder what makes little kids behave this way. Young children behave this way. Well, you know, when I heard that, I said, I want to see him. And they live in Southern California. At the time, I was in Northern California. And I said, I want to see him tomorrow. And I remember when I walked into the office and saw him, it's like my heart melted because I knew something was going on with him. And I'm like, buddy, what's going on? And he said, uncle Danny, I don't know. i'm mad all the time i said is anybody hurting you he

said no says anybody teasing you no so does anybody touching you in places they shouldn't be touching you he said no and my first thought was to scan him because that's what i do and i'd already seen hundreds of violent children and i was suspecting he had a left temporal lobe problem. It's a part of the brain we and others had associated with violence. But my next thought was you want to scan everybody. And so I start doing the, you know, stuff of my training. Dance in your head. Yeah.

You know, he's the second son in a Lebanese family. I'm the second son in a Lebanese family. I'm the second son in a Lebanese family. That gives you all sorts of issues, trust me. His older brother's perfect. He's struggling in school. And then after about 30 seconds of that in my head, the left side of my brain went, stop it. Nine-year-olds don't attack people for no reason.

You need to scan him. And if his brain is healthy, then we can find out the psychological reason for this behavior. Because we always, and we talk about it on the show all the time, that... Four circles. There are biological reasons people have trouble. There are psychological, there are social, and there are spiritual reasons people have trouble their psychological their social and their spiritual reasons people have trouble and so i actually went to the imaging center i was not part of amen clinics at the time and i held his hand as he held his teddy bear

and when the scan came up on the monitor, I'd never seen one like that before. And my mentor, Jack Poldy, was there. And so his mom and dad couldn't hear. He wrote down on a piece of paper, cyst, tumor, or stroke. Oh, my gosh. And I'm horrified. But I'm also glad we have a reason that Andrew was acting the way he was. And we got an MRI that day.

We found a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying the space of his left temporal lobe. And I called his pediatrician in Orange, California, Southern California, and I said, you find someone to take this out. And he called three neurologists and called me back a week later. And he said, a week, a week later. And all he said, none of the neurologists would recommend operating on him that they didn't think it was related to his symptoms. And oh, by the way, they wouldn't ever consider operating until he had real symptoms. And I remember that. The thought of shooting other children is not a real symptom,

I guess. It's a behavioral problem. And many years ago, there was a divorce between psychiatry and neurology. And psychiatry is the specialty that didn't get the point. Now, as a mom if that's your kid that's a real symptom by the way and so i'm screaming at dr hall what do you mean real symptoms have a homicidal suicidal child right and he got really anxious and i called a

friend of mine a pediatric neurologist at harvard and she told me the same thing and i started screaming at her too and then i'm thinking thinking to myself, neurologist, neurologist, neurosurgeons. Neurosurgeons do stuff. So I called the pediatric- Yes, I'm a neurosurgical ICU nurse. That's why I thought what you did was so cool. So yeah, I can relate to this. And so I called UCLA and talked to the pediatric neurosurgeon. His name was Jorge Lazarev he was he's famous he separated the Guatemalan twins but to me he was famous before then because he said when cysts are symptomatic we drain them he's obviously symptomatic and after surgery I got two calls one from Sherry, Andrew's mother, who said, when Andrew woke up from surgery, he smiled at her.

She said, Danny, he hadn't smiled for a year. And the second call was from Dr. Lazera, who said, oh, my God, Dr. Amen, that cyst, we didn't see it on the MRI. It was so aggressive that it actually thinned the bone over his temporal lobe. That if he would have been hit in the head, he would have died instantly. Oh, my gosh. Like with a basketball. Either way, he would have been dead in six months. And his behavior completely went back to normal.

Now, it wasn't easy, right? I mean, he had to drain the cyst a number of times. But Andrew's behavior went back to normal. Sweet, loving, connected. Well, I know Andrew today. And he's just a nice person. 23 years later. And he's got a job.

He owns his own home. He's married, he just got married. What would have happened if we wouldn't have looked at his brain? See, not looking is not science. It's malpractice. When you have symptoms that are not getting better with traditional things, somebody should look at the brain. And so I told that story at the end of a lecture at Saddleback Church. It's actually part of an hour-long lecture.

And I told it just with raw emotion. And for some reason, somebody posted it, not me, on a website, Facebook, or Lumably. And the first week it had 7 million views. And now it's like four months later, it's got 38 million views. And it's got 26,000 comments. It's crazy. And I often won't read the comments.

Because they're too, yeah. Because I've had plenty of haters over the years. And it's like I just don't need the creep. But one day I decided I't read the comments. Because they're too, yeah. Because I've had plenty of haters over the years. And it's like, I just don't need the grief. But one day I decided I would start reading them. And they just made me cry. They're so beautiful about how they've had family members who've had similar things. Now, I know the story. But that had an impact on your anxiety at the time about whether or not—

Oh, I completely lost my anxiety. You know, when it's so personal that if you don't look at the brain of somebody who's struggling, shame on you. It's like, what the matter with you? And I'm sorry because I have a personal—like, it just irritates me. I have to throw this in. Part of it is the financial model with our medical system is part of why it's not approved for, you know, it's not approved by insurance and it's not in clinical practice and all of that stuff. It has really nothing to do with whether or not it's good for patients. So it's really irritating. So I find that as a mother, if I felt that I needed it, that would really irritate me.

Well, and that's why here at Amen Clinics, we do 12-month interest refinancing. And we try to make it as affordable for everyone. And for people listening to the podcast, there's a podcast code. I think it's podcast 10. And they get a discount. But you know, that's not the point of telling the story. The point of telling the story is this is really my passion story. Well, I just thought it was so cool, because I'm getting actually, you know, I practice karate. And so my karate instructor actually had someone call me who said they saw this video. And at the time I didn't know about the video. I'm like, what, what video?

Like I thought maybe it was your Ted talk. And she's like, no, no, not the Ted talk. She's like, I know about that one, but that's not the video. And I'm like, what is she talking about? This video is like going around everywhere. And then I find out about it and it was, you know, Terry, our CEO was at the yoga studio and they were passing it around and women were crying. Right so funny so it's really cool so yeah lots of fun. The exciting message of that video is you're not stuck with the brain you have you can change it we can prove it and one of the things we want you to be is a brain warrior, which means you're serious about your brain health and you're arm-prepared and aware.

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. 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 Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.