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>> dr. amen: hi, i'm dr. daniel amen.>> tana: and i'm tana amen. welcome to change your brain, change your life.>> dr. amen: you are not stuck with the brain you have. you can make it better. we can proveit. in this episode, i'm actually going to be the one that talks about why i careabout what we do, and in the process we're going to give you the single most importantlesson we've learned from nearly a hundred thousand scans that we've done here atamen clinics over the last 23 years on patients from 111 countries.>> tana: right. >> dr. amen: so, tana fell in love with mebecause i was so cute. i'm actually in the middle of seven children. i have an olderbrother and an older sister and four younger

sisters, so surrounded by estrogen my wholelife. >> tana: i often say that you came housebrokenand fully trained. i am grateful to his sisters.\ >> dr. amen: so, but my father called me a"maverick" growing up and to him it was definitely not a good thing. when i turned18 in 1972, the draft was still going on. there was the draft lottery. my number was19 which meant "bye, you're going to get drafted,' and so i joined, actuallyto be a veterinarian's assistant. i thought, "oh, maybe i could have a choice in thekind of job i had." and i was thinking about being a veterinarian.>> tana: they lied, don't they? >> dr. amen: the recruiter totally lied tome and i ended up as an infantry medic but

i loved being a medic and that is really wheremy love of medicine was born but very quickly i learned i didn't like sleeping in themud or the idea of being shot at. >> tana: so is that why i still cannot getyou to go camping? he still cannot camp. >> dr. amen: it was not that much fun. andso i got myself retrained as an x-ray technician and what our professor used to always sayis "how do you know unless you look?" i loved being an x-ray technician and i lovetaking pictures. i mean it's just, it was awesome and fun and interesting and it reallysolidified my desire to be a doctor. and so when i get out of the military in 1975, ichanged my major in college to be in a pre-med and i was fortunate enough to do really wellin school and then get in to medical school.

and during my second year of medical schoolsomeone very close to me tried to kill herself which just horrified me. and so i broughther off to the department of psychiatry at oral roberts university where i went to medicalschool and just fell in love with the doctor that she saw. his name was stan wallacei mean, kind, compassionate, caring and i realized if he helped her it wouldn't justhelped her, it would end up helping her, her husband, her children and even her grandchildrenas they would be affected by someone who is happier and more stable. so, i really fellin love with psychiatry because i realized it had the potential to change generationsof people. i've not regretted it one minute. i love being a psychiatrist. now fast-forwardto 1991, i'm a psychiatrist now nearly

10 years and i go to my first lecture on brainspect imaging. spect is a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity.it looks at how the brain works. dr. jack pouldy was the nuclear medicine physicianwho gave us the lecture and he said spect was a tool to give psychiatrists more informationon their patients to help them so we will become more effective in helping our patients.that one lecture combine my two loves, right imaging and psychiatry, and reallycreated a revolution in my life, and over the next 23 years my colleagues and i wouldbuild the world's largest database of brains scans related to behavior. the six amen clinicsnow are the most active imaging centers in the world when it comes to brain imaging forpsychiatry. so, behind me are two spect scans;

image on the left these are healthy scansshows the outside surface. so it's the same person. we're just looking at theirbrain in two different ways. spect is different than a cat scan or an mri. those are anatomystudies. spect looks at how the brain functions. so the image on the left full, even, symmetricalactivity, the color doesn't mean anything; image on the right shows the most active areaswhich are typically in the back part of the brain.\>> tana: so i have a lot of people asked. they don't understand why an mri or ctscan is any different than this. i love this analogy because i think it's very clear,if i could quickly just throw this out there. so if you take a computer, because i havemine, two of them recently crashed. if you

take a computer and you drop it on the floorand it crashes and it will not turn on but you were to get an mri or ct scan of it inessence, it would look like it was in perfect shape, right?, because it's in one piece.all the parts are still in there. everything's fine. but if you try to turn it on, it'snot going to run right and that's what a spect scan does. it shows you how it'sfunctioning. so that's the difference. >> dr. amen: well another analogy, if youtook a car engine and you got an mri of the car engine it would look like all the partsbut it wouldn't tell you anything about how it works. so an mri will tell you, youhave a brain but won't necessarily tell you how it's functioning.>> tana: it'll tell you if you have a tumor

but it's not.>> dr. amen: and spect really tells you three things; good activity, too little, ortoo much. so if we compare healthy scan on the left to one of the first scans i did,this was on geraldine who came to a hospital with resistant depression. she had two hugeright hemisphere of strokes or if we look at someone who has alzheimer's disease,the back half of their brain is deteriorating and what we've now know, alzheimer'sactually starts in the brain decades before you have any symptoms or if we look at someonewho had traumatic brain injury, i mean you can really easily see the difference in thescans and often in traumatic brain injury, the mris and ct scans are normal because theanatomy ________ physiology or the function

that's not.>> tana: well what's so interesting is you can actually see where it's at whichtells you a lot about behavior. >> dr. amen: right.>> tana: and i just find that fascinating. >> dr. amen: and when i first started doingimaging work we do, i was the director of the dual diagnosis unit. it's a psychiatrichospital unit that deals with drug addicts. so when i saw a healthy scan versus drug addictscans and went, "okay, the real reason not to use drugs is they damage your brain."in fact, at the time i have three children and i brought the drug-affected scans hometo my three kids and effectively induced the anxiety disorders in all three of them andnow that we have chloe she

>> tana: and now four.>> dr. amen: she totally gets that drugs are not a good idea for your brain. sometimeswe see brains that worked too hard. i mean oftentimes. and if it works too hard in thefront, it's in the image behind me, that often goes along with people who can'tstop thinking, who might have obsessive-compulsive disorder or ocd. seizure activity usuallyshows up as a focal hotspot one area of the brain and that's why we're usinganti-seizure medicines to calm things down. in 1992, so now i'm doing the scans fora year. i'm so excited and when i graduated from medical school, i had two goals. onewould be a really good psychiatrist. i loved what i was learning and what i did and i wantedto be a writer. and my goal was actually to

write articles and books to translate theresearch of other scientists for the general population. so, now we say, you know, i'mnot that bright, so if i can understand things and explain them then other people can too.and so that was really my gift to take complex concepts, really sort of take themapart to understand them and then translate that for the general public and i had alreadywritten my first national book before i ever ordered a scan. and so as i start doing thescans, i started writing about them because i'm getting pretty excited about this,and in 1992 i go to the american psychiatric association's annual meeting to an all-dayconference given by physicians at creighton university on brain spect imaging in childpsychiatry. and then there was another all-day

conference on brain spect imaging in psychiatryand i'm so excited because by then i already ordered hundred of scans. i found them helpfuland i loved that my profession is moving forward. but at that meeting, there are researchersthat told me and other people we shouldn't be doing this. you shouldn't use imagingin clinical practice. it was just for research. now think about what my dad said about me.>> tana: that makes no sense. >> dr. amen: think about what my dad saidabout me and when i heard them, i no longer look up to them. i begin to think there issomething the matter with them because i've already found them helpful. they're helpfulin so many ways. >> tana: right and we use these scans in thehospitals, it's not like they don't

work.\>> dr. amen: they decrease, the scans decrease stigma. they increase compliance. they giveme more information to help my patients and the ivory tower people would go, "no it'sfor us. it's not for you." at which point i become furious because it's justa bad position to take to not use technology to help your patients.>> tana: when it's available and you know it works.>> dr. amen: and so i'm like, "you're kidding, right?' psychiatrists make diagnosisby talking to people without any biological information. they actually make diagnosislike they did in 1840 when lincoln was depressed. so, for a long time i loved lincoln becausehe failed and he failed and he failed and

he failed and then he became a wild successand so he was very persistent. but lincoln suffered with depression and a lot of peopledon't know he had a bad head injury when he was ten years old. so he was actually kickedin the head by a horse and unconscious all night long but throughout his life he hadseveral serious bouts with depression. in fact, in the winter of 1840 he was suicidaland his friends took away his knives and then he went to see his doctor, anson henry. andhow did dr. henry diagnosed lincoln with depression? he talked to him. he looked at him. he lookedfor symptom clusters. that's how he diagnosed him. that's exactly the same way peopleare making psychiatric diagnosis in 1992. >> tana: right.

>> dr. amen: for that matter, for most people in 2015 >> tana: right. and i want to interject somethinghere because you know psychiatry doesn't have a great reputation in general. it doesn't.i know it sounds as a surprise to you. in fact, i almost cancelled my first date withyou when i found out you're a psychiatrist, but there's a reason for that. it'snot just because many of us including me have had really bad experiences with psychiatristfor that reason because of the guessing; because you get hurt and i personally got hurt byit. >> dr. amen: so guessing is not innocuous.so in 1980 when i decided to be a psychiatrist, i told my dad, and i mean you probably getthe sense to our show, that as much as i love

my father he was difficult.\>> tana: i love his father. okay.\ >> dr. amen: my father had two favorite words; "bullshit" was the first one and "no" was the second one.>> tana: i love his dad. i don't know what that means but >> dr. amen: they have similarities. and when i told him in 1980 i wanted to be a psychiatristhe got really angry at me and he said, "what? you want to be a nut doctor? why don'tyou want to be a real doctor?" and it hurt my feelings and at that time i really didn'tunderstand but now i sort of get it, it's because we don't act like real doctors.what other medical specialty makes diagnosis based on symptoms without any biological interventions?>> tana: and i guarantee you. somebody watching

right now has a family member or they themselveshave been made worse by someone doing that. i guarantee.>> dr. amen: not a question. and so my comment back to the people who criticized me was,"well, don't you know that psychiatrists are the only medical specialists who rarelylook at the organ they treat?" it's like, well, cardiologists look, neurologistslook, your orthopedic doctor looks, gastroenterologist looks, every other medical specialty looks,psychiatrists guess and because of that they hurt people. before i started imaging andi'd hurt people, you know, they come with the classic symptoms of depression, and i'dput them on prozac or medication like prozac. some people would get better, other peoplewould get worse. they'd become homicidal

or suicidal. i had somebody that met all thecriteria for add or adhd. on ritalin, some people, be like a miracle. they go from dsand f stage and bs and other people would now become anxious. they'd start pickingat their skin, they couldn't sleep, they'd become paranoid. and i was like, "wellhow the heck would i know?" so i really felt like i was throwing darts in the darkat people. there is a reason most psychiatric medications have "black box" warnings.give them to the wrong people and you'll hurt them. so you can see i'm passionateand i'm persistent because i have personal experience that it would help with the peoplei cared for which, or my patients. and i wasn't about to let some researcher tell me whati could or couldn't do. at that time, still,

i'm a double-board certified psychiatrist.so that means i went to medical school for four years. i did five years of psychiatricresidency and fellowship. i took the tests and all the trainings. so i'm board certifiedin general psychiatry and also in child and adolescent psychiatry by the american boardof psychiatry and neurology. so i've all the credentials and so the fact that someoneat the university or the ___________ said "no, no. you shouldn't do that."you know it just didn't cut it with me because what it left me with is guessing,and that's wrong when i could have more information.>> tana: i thought it was so interesting so when i did not cancel my date with you. wheni actually met you, so i'm a neurosurgical

icu nurse, and so when i met you and you startedtelling me what you did, my first thought was, "okay, well that's really different.why don't all psychiatrists do that?" it made no sense to me. so i couldn't sortof wrap my brain around why you were, you know, letting more people didn't do thatbecause this was very different but it made perfect sense to me. in fact, i couldn'tfigure out why everyone wasn't doing it. so from a standpoint of somebody who worksin the hospital, deals with scans all day, we do spect scans so it didn't make senseto me that more people weren't using them.\ >> dr. amen: well, and one way you get someoneto fall in love with you, i mean, you know, people go, "how did you get a pretty girl?"is you do something nice for someone they

love and tana told me about her dad who hadbeen diagnosed with dementia, who was a recluse.\ >> tana: i did move him in with me. he wasn'tanswering his phone. he wasn't coming out of his house. he wasn't taking a shower,and he'd been diagnosed with alzheimer's disease.>> dr. amen: and so i'm like, well we have to look. how do we know what he really hasunless we look? he's also diagnosed with depression and when i scanned him, he didn'thave alzheimer's disease. and in fact, he was on...>> tana: i mean what a shock to us. >> dr. amen: he was on a toxic cocktail ofmedication and so i changed his medicine, added some supplements, worked with him andthis "emented recluse," five or six

months later is now giving all-day seminarsat the church. >> tana: yeah. seven-hour seminars and holdingbible study at my house. >> dr. amen: but if you don't look, youdon't know. >> tana: right.>> dr. amen: one of the big early lessons i learned is that illnesses like adhd, anxiety,depression, addictions, are not single or simple disorders in the brain that theyall have multiple types. so if we look at two people with depression, what you'llsee is one has really low activity in the brain, the other has really high activity.do you think they'll respond to the same treatment? of course not and how would i everknow unless i actually look? so now i'm

pretty passionate about this. another earlylesson is that mild traumatic brain injuries are major cause of psychiatric illness andnobody knows it. why? because they have bad behavior. so think of the football players,you know depression, suicide, domestic violence and they end up seeing psychiatrists who asa profession as a whole never look at the organ they treat. and i'm thinking, "ohwe should scan these people." so here's an example. this is a fifteen-year old boywho had failed three residential treatment programs. he kept getting kicked out. so hisbehavior is so bad at home they have to hospitalize him or, you know, put him in a special programand his behavior is so bad there they can't contain him. and so they ended up coming toour clinic and the whole left side of his

brain is damaged. i'm like, "when didhe have a brain injury?" and the mother just got so sad, she said, "i knew somethingwas wrong with him." when he was three years old he fell down a flight of stairsand he was unconscious for half an hour and the doctor at the hospital diagnosed him withmild traumatic brain injury but if you look at his brain, there's absolutely nothingmild about what had happened to him. so yes, his behavior was troubled and people judgedhim as a bad boy but in fact he had a damaged brain and that just wasn't fair.>> tana: you know it's interesting. i'm the first person to think and say that peopleshould be held accountable for their actions. i mean i'm not kidding about, you know,protecting innocent people but what i love

about our work is that we have the opportunityto really help people and prevent so much of this with the early signs and i love that.i mean it frustrates me and it excites me because when i think about some of the people,you know, the batman sugar, right, there were signs early. there were early signs. you knowif you have the opportunity and you were able to look>> dr. amen: but as a profession we don't look and if you think of all the mass shooters >> tana: it's just so frustrating.>> dr. amen: almost all of them were seeing psychiatrists. they had seen psychiatristsand almost all of them had been on medication in the dark. we'll talk about that in justa little bit. so as i got really interested

in the idea of traumatic brain injury andpsychiatric illness, the literature's actually very clear. the scientific literature is veryclear. undiagnosed brain injuries are major cause of homelessness. 58% of the homelessmen in toronto had a significant brain injury before they were homeless.>> tana: so that means it's huge. 58%. >> dr. amen: it's a major cause of drugand alcohol abuse. brand new study says children who have a brain injury; they are three andhalf times more likely to have problems with addictions. it's a major cause of depression.it's a major cause of panic attacks, adhd and suicide. and the sad thing is, is thatliving with the condition that no one knows about that is treatable. that is a crime.>> tana: and when you think of all the other

people that may not have had to suffer asa result. >> dr. amen: right. and so as i went alongin my career i got so much criticism. i got reported to the california medical board.i was investigated for a year. thank god at the end of the year they said, "we didn'tfind anything you did wrong. we just hope you'll publish your research so that otherpeople can learn from you." >> tana: and so you started publishing.>> dr. amen: and so we've now published 72 studies. but as the criticism grew louder,so did the lessons. judges >> tana: but you have to understand too. you'renot a very conflict-seeking person. so he's sort of conflict-avoiding for the most part.>> dr. amen: yeah. people really knew me.

you know i come out with really strong statementsbecause i believe this. >> tana: yeah.>> dr. amen: but i don't like to fight. >> tana: no. he does not. that would be me.you don't like to fight. >> dr. amen: that would be you, i guess.>> tana: so that was hard for him and i used to sit there and go, "i don't understandwhy this bothers you" because, you know, someone's criticizing him and you knowjust screaming him in an article but on the same day we're walking and some mothercomes running up crying, throws her arms around him and she's like, "you saved my son'slife." now to me it's a big brainer. it's not a no-brainer. it's a big brainer.which one is more important? you know i wouldn't

care so much about the guy that's criticizingme that has no idea. he was clueless about what i'm doing. it's the people thatyou're helping that are important. but he doesn't like that kind of conflict forthe most part. >> dr. amen: i wondered you know why god wouldput me in that situation but i mean it was just so clear. the message was so clear. sothe lessons went up. judges and defense attorneys sought our help to understand criminal behavior.so we have scanned more than 500 convicted felons, 90 murderers and our work taught usthat people who do bad things often have troubled brains. okay. that's not a surprise. whatdid surprise me they often have brains that could be rehabilitated. so here'sa radical idea. what if we evaluated and treated

people who have troubled brains rather thansimply warehousing them in toxic, stressful environments?>> tana: okay. let's clarify. >> dr. amen: let's not lie to ourselves.see i like that verse in the new testament john chapter 8, know the truth and thetruth will set you free. when you put people in prison you are not rehabilitating them,you're punishing >> tana: well there are a lot of people likeme out there watching. let's be very clear about one thing. we're not>> dr. amen: i mean we're just telling you the truth is we are getting retributionon them. we are not rehabilitating them to warehouse someone in a toxic, stressful environment.now i want to keep our society safe. that

is really important.>> tana: you're talking to mama bear here so>> dr. amen: but shouldn't we also be scanning, because most of the people that go to jailgo home >> tana: now that's a good point.>> dr. amen: and if you don't work on rehabilitating their brain, recidivism is anywhere from 40to 70% and so you're not investing in the health of our society. so my experience >> tana: so to your point>> dr. amen: let me finish. my experience is that we could actually, by investing inrehabilitating the brains in people who do troubled things, is that we could be makingpeople more functional. so i actually and

i live in orange county. it's a very conservativecommunity and i think this is the most conservative idea that some people will think i'm ableeding heart liberal and that's just not how i feel because if we invest in peoplethat, and their brain health, what we're doing is we're investing their abilityto stay out of jail, to work, to support their families and pay taxes but, you know, oursociety got the wall street mind setup, you know, well how much money do i have now asopposed to investing in the future.\ >> tana: let me say something to your point,to your credit because i'm not about >> dr. amen: we've had this fight.>> tana: well, but this is to your credit. this is to your point. now i am mama bear.i am not going to make excuses for that. you

hurt my kid i don't want to hear any excuses.it's over. but that's it. there is a prison, it was a prison at idyllwild somewherein _____________ and they did something similar to what you're talking about. now theydidn't scan. they didn't go to this extreme but just by making changes by includingtherapy, they changed their diet radically. i mean they served literally no processedfood or junk food at all. changed it to primarily plant-based diet and they, what they did isthey actually separated the prison into two sides and they allowed the prisoners to choose.the ones who wanted to go through therapy, do gratitude and have all these different,you know, aspects out of their lives, job training, as well as a healthy lifestyle,exercise, diet and then they allowed the other

side to do with their work, the traditionalprison system. on the side where they actually changed their lifestyle, recidivism droppedto 2%. they closed it down. now why i have no idea it's ridiculous. of course i'msure it had something to do with cost but the point being>> dr. amen: well in a prison industry is a big industry that lobbies, i mean it's >> tana: well in part of that complain>> dr. amen: it's criminal on how many people that we incarcerate with this mindsetof let's be tough on crime without really trying to understand it and rehabilitateit. >> tana: but to your point these were peoplewho were going home. okay. so whether we like

it or not they're being let out. >> dr. amen: right. >> tana: and so recidivism dropped.>> dr. amen: and nobody thinks about the brain in the criminal justices and my work saysit should be planted right in the middle of it. dostoevsky, one of my favorite russianauthors, once said, "a society should be judged not by how it treats its outstandingcitizens, but by how it treats its criminals." and as you know he wrote crime and punishmentso i say instead of just crime and punishment, we should be thinking of crime evaluationand treatment. so let me get to the single most important lesson we've learned fromlooking at nearly a hundred thousand scans. it's the theme of the show. you can literallychange people's brains and when you do

you change their lives. you are not stuckwith the brain you have, you can make it better and we've proven it. i get so excited aboutthis. so, amen clinics did the first and the largest study on active and retired nfl players.we started in 2007. the nfl was actively saying, "we don't know. we're studying theissue." roger goodell was in front of congress in 2009 saying, "we don't know. we'restudying," and maxine waters, the congresswoman from los angeles said, "commissioner, haven'tyou say you're studying traumatic brain injury in football? it's a conflict ofinterest." >> tana: but my favorite part is the littlemice wearing helmets. it was crazy. >> dr. amen: they were, they're actuallydoing studies where they were putting little

helmets on mice and whacked them into thehead going we can't tell. >> tana: how crazy is that?>> dr. amen: our study demonstrated, on a hundred players, damaged everywhere in theirbrain. i mean it's really global reduction of blood flow to their brain. but, and thiswas the exciting thing, we put them on a brain rehabilitation program. we're going totalk about it in many of our shows. so, lifestyle interventions, natural supplements, and whatwe found is 80% of our players showed high levels of improvement when they followed theplan. you have to follow the plan. we're so excited but we've known that for a longtime and we've known that for decades. you're not stuck with the brain you have.we can make it better but reversing brain

damage is an exciting new frontier but theimplications are much wider than just traumatic brain injury. so here's a, one of the girls,a teenage girl who was running away from home. she was cutting herself. she was suicidal.she was failing in school. she had really low blood flow to her brain and on treatmenther brain was fuller, fatter, much more active >> tana: and oh by the way she is now a junior and the top three in her class in a privateschool. >> dr. amen: i mean it's just awesome,the difference that you can make by changing someone's brain. one of my favorite stories,so one of the journals i've wrote about an article on this. some of my colleaguescriticized me. i hate that. and an hour after

i read the article, i saw nancy's followup scans. so this is nancy's first scan, ten weeks before. her husband is one of ourfootball players and ray white played for the san diego chargers and he joined my studyso i would see his wife who'd just been diagnosed with frontal temporal lobe dementia,bad dementia. and you would see her scan, the front part of her brain is deteriorating,it's dying and i said, "you know i agree with the diagnosis but if she was my wifeand i like my wife i would do these things." so i put her on a very aggressive brain rehabilitationprogram and so i wanted to see her back in ten weeks. ten weeks later her brain is muchbetter as she is better. so i just read the article criticizing me and then i see thesetwo scans. i mean this is why i do this work

because it changes people.\>> tana: but see i love what one of your players said. they only go after the guy with theball. if you weren't making the difference, if you weren't shaking stuff up, nobodywould be talking about you at all. so you know, they go after the guy with the ball.\>> dr. amen: so, (i mean it's just), you're not stuck with what you have. you can makeit better. it takes work but it's possible. i have to tell you the story that is my passionstory. what has really kept me doing this all these years is andrew. so andrew is alittle boy who at 9 years old attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no particularreason. his mother called me crying and she said, "dr. amen, he's just different.he's mean, he doesn't smile anymore.

i went in to his room today and found twopictures that he had drawn, one of them he was hanging from a tree. the other picturehe was shooting other children." >> tana: see? these are what we see in thenews. >> dr. amen: andrew was columbine aurora-sandyhook waiting to happen. now 999 psychiatrists out of a thousand would have put him on medicationor put him in psychotherapy.\ >> tana: the hospital.\>> dr. amen: in my experience i had to scan him. how the heck do i know why a sweet littleboy would do something so awful? that i had to rule out or rule in that he had a brainissue. and in fact this is the first case where he was missing his left temporal lobe.he actually had a cyst the size of a golf

ball.>> tana: now so people understand, the left temporal lobe is the part of the brain that'sassociated with behavior and temper. >> dr. amen: it certainly can be and we'dalready correlated so this is actually in april 1995 and it's the first time i'veseen this but i'd seen many left temporal lobe problems involved in aggression and violence.and so i was sad but sort of glad i could explain his behavior but then trying to getsomebody to actually take it seriously and drain the cyst, turned out he had an arachnoidcyst occupying the space of his left temporal lobe was a challenged but jorge lazareff atucla drained the cyst and when he drained the cyst, andrew's behavior completelywent back to normal. and this was andrew after

the surgery and now andrew who is my nephew,who is my godson, 18 years later, he works, he's a great kid, he owns his own home,he pays taxes. when you do this work, i mean for me it is always been a privilege. i meanwhen you have the privilege to change someone's brain, you not only change his or her life,you actually have the opportunity to change generations to come. you are not stuck withthe brain you have. you can make it better. god bless you.}