Healing Anxiety and Depression | Daniel G. Amen, Lisa C. Routh

Healing Anxiety and Depression | Daniel G. Amen, Lisa C. Routh | Fascinating, but exercise some healthy skepticism.

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Healing Anxiety an...

	Healing Anxiety and Depression Daniel G. Amen, Lisa C. Routh Berkley Trade, 2004 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 36 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

There is help!

There are a lot of self help books out there, and in that there are a lot of them that don't help. This book helps people do what they need to do to not suffer anymore. It talks about medication if needed, and other natural alternatives as well. I like how Dr. Amen stresses that it is a change in a whole lifestyle. Taking medicine, natural or not needs to be accompanied by a GOOD DIET (supplements) and EXCERCISE! For anyone that is sick of being anxious and or depressed, this book is a great place to start! He gives tools to help a person get out of feeling stuck.
Highly recommend to really read the book. Kind of like a textbook. Going back to pages if one has to, to really understand ones behavior, and what one needs to do to be healthy. Highly recommended!

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Fascinating, but exercise some healthy skepticism.

Amen's "new program" actually has less to do with the patient's protocol than the physician's basis for selecting it. The author maintains that his research in "imaging" various brain patterns and wave activity in selected portions of the brain enables him to determine the precise sort of depressive-anxiety disorder (the author identifies seven) being experienced by the patient. Upon making this determination, the prescribed therapies are along familiar lines--tricyclic medications, SSRI's, SNRI's, etc. The photos are interesting and possibly useful (though not necessarily proof of cause and effect), and the readerly prose insures that the reader will pick up a good deal of information about the structure of the brain. Also, the author provides a questionnaire to enable a reader to approximate what the brain images might have confirmed, thus enabling him to determine his type of depressive disorder(s), if any. From there, the practical information and applications are likely to be of value in proportion to the amount of information the reader already has about depression and anxiety.

The author covers psychotropic medications, cognitive approaches, exercise and other mainline therapies. He says very little about combinations of medications. And the book loses some of its credibility, in my opinion, in the discussion of alternative therapies that have been discredited elsewhere. There's no scientific evidence I'm aware of that would support the theory that supplements like GABA, l-Tyrosine, or l-Phenylananine alleviate anxiety-depression or even break through the blood membrane to become part of the body's own chemistry. Also, whether injections of testosterone and DHEA are sufficiently helpful to outweigh the risks makes questionable the author's apparent recommendation of them. Finally, some of the information already appears dated--for example, the assertion that Ambien is totally unrelated to the benzodiazapines and is non-addictive.

Still, the book is quite comprehensive, provides much accessible and potentially useful information and, provided the reader exercises some healthy skepticism, should make the subject less daunting and confusing.

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Objective, scientific neuroimaging reveals reality of anxiety and depression, and treatment results

Healing Anxiety and Depression is one of the most scientifically valid discussions of these disorders. Dr. Amen's use of SPECT brain scans to analyze "emotional" and "behavioral" disorders is a welcome contrast to the speculative theories which have dominated treatment of anxiety and depression. This book is generously illustrated with SPECT brain scans of actual patients and clearly reveals physical imbalances in brain blood flow distribution. More importantly, the scans show improved function, with appropriate treatment. Psychiatry is the only medical speciality which does not routinely examine, image or measure the organ system, which it treats. Functional brain scans and neurotransmitter testing are finally moving psychiatric treatment beyond the trial and error guessing it has been mired in, for decades. Amazingly, SPECT gamma ray cameras are available in almost every hospital cardiac unit, where they are used for cardiac stress tests. Hopefully, they will begin receiving additional use, for brain scanning.

Interestingly, Dr. Amen has included a SPECT scan of his brain. Inclusion of his own scan speaks volumes, concerning the safety of SPECT brain scans.We will probably wait a long time before we learn of anyone practicing electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), who has submitted to ECT electro shock therapy.

The scans and case histories reveal the reality of disorders including traumatic brain injury, depression, pernicious anemia, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, ectasy and marijuana abuse. Improvements produced by diverse treatments including Prozac, Lamictal, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and St. John's Wort are clearly revealed in scan images. The image of impaired blood flow distribution, due to Xanax will confirm what many suspect-Benzodiazepine medications impair brain function.

Amen and Routh provide an overview of diverse treatments including most pharmaceutical treaments and many nutritional and herbal treatments, in addition to cognitive behavioral therapy, systematic desensitization, biofeedback, exercise, deep breathing and EMDR.

This book was published in 2003, before the sleepwalking syndromes associated with Ambien became more widely publicized and Lunesta became available as a safer alternative. Although Amen and Routh recommend GABA supplements, for anxiety, GABA seldom crosses the blood-brain barrier, and we have seldom found an anxious patient, who responds to GABA supplements. Neurotransmitter profiles of our anxious patients indicate excess glutamate causes more anxiety than deficient GABA levels.

Florida Detox has referred patients to Amen Clinics, for SPECT brain scans and the scans have revealed useful clinical information, especially when patients suffered severe anxiety or had multiple chemical dependencies.

I suspect many readers would like to see a larger, expanded version of this book, with more case histories and scans. After performing over 20,000 SPECT scans, Amen Clinics certainly possesses the scans and case histories needed for a larger sequel to this book.

Steven Sponaugle, Research Director, Florida Detox

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Don't buy this book from Amazon

After page 186, the book repeats pages 123 through 186. After the second page 186, the book jumps right to page 251. Page 187 through page page 250 are missing from the book. The information I was able to look through was really great. There must have been problems with the printing.

Too much nature not enough nurture

I think Amen goes a little to far claiming to heal depression and anxiety. Althrough depression and anxiety have physical manifistations and treatments I think it is important to address the psycholgical cuases and issues that contribute to these problems.

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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