I'd like to add someone to this conversation.
Someone I consider a really valued friend and colleague,
Dr. Daniel Amen.
Now Dr. Amen is a psychiatrist,
he's a New York Times Best Selling Author,
and founder of Amen Clinics
with nine locations across the United States.
Now his clinics have the world's largest data base
of brain scans for psychiatry,
totalling more than 160,000 scans
of patients from 150 countries.
Dr. Amen has a new book
and it's entitled "The End of Mental Illness."
And it shows how most psychiatric problems
are not mental health issues at all,
but rather they are brain health issues
that steal your mind.
He says get your brain right
and your mind will follow.
I'm so frustrated, Dr. Amen,
that people default to mental illness
when they never look at the neurological underpinning
of some of these behaviors.
And you say that perhaps more often than not
that's where you should start looking.
Most psychiatrists never look at the brain.
And that is why stigma lives,
because we don't see this as a medical illness,
we see it as a moral failing.
And that's just wrong.
And when I started looking at the brain over 30 years ago
it just upended everything.
And what I realized is most psychiatric problems,
they're not mental, they're brain.
And in this case you actually
did some very sophisticated scans
and analysis with Cameron.
And Cameron, you've agreed that it's okay
for us to discuss that here, correct?
Yes, sir,
And Dr. Amen, if you will, step up here
so we can take a look
and you can kind of narrate for Cameron
what we're talking about.
So SPECT is a study that looks at blood flow
and activity.
It looks at how your brain works.
And it basically shows us three things.
Good activity, too little or too much.
And then our job is to balance it.
Here on the left we're looking at the outside surface
of a healthy brain.
And then this view shows us the most active areas
of the brain,
and in the cerebellum,
in the back bottom part of the brain,
it should have the most activity.
Let's move on to Cameron.
And so healthy on the left,
here's Cameron.
And you can see all these holes,
crevices, dents, which are a disaster for a young man.
Okay, so this is the healthy image here,
and that ties to this image for Cameron now, correct?
Correct.
So what are we looking at there?
And Cameron this is very important for you.
Yeah.
So what we're seeing is the front part of his brain.
Can I draw on it?
Yes.
The most important part of your brain,
it's the largest part of the human brain,
focus, forethought, judgment, impulse control,
planning, forethought, learning from the mistakes you make
is significantly low in activity and blood flow.
And his left temporal lobe here,
underneath your temple,
behind your eye,
involved in memory, learning,
mood stability, temper control is very damaged.
And you can see the left side,
which is here, more damaged than the right.
So I suspect,
and here's the left side of his brain,
that the injury was on the left side.
Okay, so this is the left here.
And it hurt his brain significantly.
And then we did the scan twice.
Okay, we looked at his brain at rest,
now here it is active.
And when he concentrates it's actually better,
and that's good news
because those holes, your brain,
you don't have holes in your brain,
what it's showing is low activity,
and those areas aren't dead,
but they're struggling.
And then when you try to use your brain it gets better.