Change your brain, change your life! by Daniel G. Amen

Author:Daniel G. Amen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mental illness -- Physiological aspects, Brain -- Pathophysiology, Neuropsychiatry -- Popular works, Mental illness -- Chemotherapy
Publisher: Times Books
Published: 1998-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

even when saying yes is clearly in their own best interest. The question I ask parents to help me diagnose this disorder is "How many times out of ten when you ask this child to do something will he (or she) do it the first time without arguing or fighting?" Most children will comply seven to eight times out of ten without a problem. For most ODD children the answer is usually three or fewer; for many of them it is zero.

David

I first met David when he was seven years old. He came into my office with his mother. He was wearing typically dirty shoes, and the minute he sat down, he put his feet up on my navy-blue leather couch. His mother, embarrassed by his rudeness, took his feet off the couch. He put them back on the couch. She took them off. He put them back on again. Looking angry, she took them off again. Right away, he put them back on and she took them off. I was watching the cingulate of the mother/son pair in action. David had to have his feet on the couch, mostly because his mother didn't want them on the couch (he also probably wanted to see what would happen if he irritated me). His mother couldn't stand the fact that he wouldn't listen to her, and she had to have his feet off the couch. Seeing the mother/son cingulate in action, I knew that many of their problems probably stemmed from an inability to shift attention and to hold their own positions. To confirm my suspicions about David, I said ten innocuous things, such as "The weather is good today . . . Don't you think California is nice? [he was from out of state]... I like your outfit" and so on. David argued with eight of the ten things I said. "The weather is awful... I hate California ... My mother made me wear this stupid outfit. . ." With an incredulous look on her face, David's mother argued with him: "This is beautiful weather . . . Yesterday you said you wanted to live in California . . . This is your favorite outfit..." Further conversation with his mother suggested we had a generational cingulate problem.

When I first suggested a connection between cingulate overactivity and oppositional defiant disorder, many of my colleagues did not take me seriously. How could ODD, which is an externalizing behavior disorder, be related to OCD, an internal anxiety disorder? After seeing this pattern over years it makes perfect sense to me. These children cannot shift their attention. They get stuck on No, No

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