AMEN 2009 Student Conference: The Ministry of Healing

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Allen Lloyd

Reaching and Regaining Peak Mental Performance

It's good to be with you this afternoon and look forward to seeing more of you during the weekend.

There are meetings tonight for the AMEN student chapter and in fact it'll be a presentation that I've never given before on request of the AMEN student leadership here on an overview of the title conference, the Ministry of Healing.

And so, if you're interested in particularly ministry of healing and how it relates to today's world and today's medical world, I think you'll find that of interest and there'll be some other presentations tonight as well.

And then tomorrow, the Divine Worship Service will be over at the Dreysen Center, and that's following in the footsteps of Jesus.

And that'll be a takeoff from the Ministry of Healing as well.

But you'll find out how Christ did interviews with people.

We'll analyze that to some extent and what he was looking for, what he already knew before the interview, what he didn't know, and where he was trying to lead them.

And that's what we'll need to learn more about how to do when we're dealing with the one-on-one interview that physicians and dentists and other health care providers do very often.

And then in the afternoon, there'll be several exciting workshops, And I'm sure you'll find 1 for you as well.

And then there'll be another presentation Sunday, or a couple of presentations Sunday morning.

So hopefully, you'll look at the schedule and be able to make it to as many of those as possible.

This 1, the AMEN student chapter didn't tell me what to talk about.

In fact, I asked Mark, what am I supposed to talk about on Friday?

He told me there would be more limited time, So we'll probably have some time for questions as well.

But I thought I would just share a little bit about how I ended up doing what I'm doing currently, particularly in the area of mental health.

Now we run peak mental performance programs.

In fact, we have people come and stay with us.

When we do peak mental performance programs, it's often 5 days, but sometimes they'll stay as long as 10 days.

And we have people that are normally, some that are challenged mentally in some way, shape, or form, to obtain peak mental performance.

But we also have people of normal intelligence come in order to find out how to excel.

Then we have people who already excel who want to get to the very top 99.9 percentile in excelling and to crank it up another notch.

And so we run these programs, but we didn't start out running these programs in that way.

What we started out doing was actually treating an illness, a mental illness, called major depression, and particularly looking at finding and treating the cause.

And then it ended up going in a direction where we continue to do this, but we also continue to help people that are not depressed.

First of all, a little bit of background in regards to depression.

The number of people developing depression worldwide has steadily increased since 1915, And that's according to epidemiological data, and it's very consistent data.

Every generation since 1915 has had more major depression than previous generations.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, this was called the midlife crisis.

That was the lay term for it, because it tended to occur later in life, after age 40, 50.

Now, it's not called that, simply because major episodes are frequently there by the age of 25.

And the risk of depression has increased over time in all age groups.

We used to say 1 in 4 women a few years ago will suffer from major depression at some point in their lives.

Now new data shows that by the time a girl graduates from high school, she'll have a 1 in 4 chance of already having major depression.

And so that means a lifelong risk is about double that.

And so it's about 1 in 2 now for females.

And it may be even greater than that if we take a look at it another way.

And if we take a look at all forms of depression, not just major depression, including situational depression, where you're suffering a serious loss and emotional consequences and mental and physical consequences from that loss.

Turns out 99% of people by age 70 will suffer from situational depression at some interval as a result of serious loss.

And so depression is something that either you're going to have or you already know someone who has it, and it is going to be something that you're going to come in contact no matter what specialty you're in.

Just a little brief overview of the DSM-IV criteria for the diagnosis of major depression.

And this is...when you take a look at these symptoms, this is what is mentioned in the lay literature, deep sadness.

But when you look at the fine print of the DSM-IV, It says that emptiness also qualifies.

And many people, particularly the men, this is why men are not diagnosed as much as women, women, with their deep sadness, they tend to have more of the deep sadness and they tend to have crying spells.

And it won't be a sad thing that will happen, just maybe something they didn't prefer, and they will start to cry or have to go somewhere so that someone else doesn't see them cry.

And then they're saying, why am I crying?

And that is a clue to them that something is wrong, and so they tend to seek medical treatment more readily than men.

Men tend to have the emptiness instead of the deep sadness, and they just think it's a normal part of their life to feel empty.

It is not normal for human beings to feel empty at least the majority of the time.

And what the DSM-IV says, you don't have to feel sad or empty all the time.

It's the majority of the time for a two-week span prior to asking the question.

Apathy means that you get up in the morning, you're not really interested in the day's activities.

You're not excited and motivated to face the day.

And It's almost like, boy, do I really have to?

And so you do it out of a sense of duty and responsibility, but not really interest.

And if you take a look at both of those symptoms, you can see that these are definitely more prominent.

1 of the ways it's kind of interesting in this field of depression that I've been dealing with now since the 90s, in fact, we put on treatment-resistant programs now for people who have tried everything and still have major depression, and then they come and attend a 10-day program.

But after dealing with this field of depression and then talking in everyday associations and contacts, I've become obviously a little more astute at picking up whether an individual is depressed.

And often you can pick it up in their voice.

A lot of people with depression don't recognize that they are revealing it per se.

In fact, they go through great lengths to try to hide the fact that they're depressed.

Most people on antidepressants, for instance, think that they're hiding it pretty well.

They may be for people that are not very close to them, but the ones that are close to them recognize that there's something emotionally wrong with the individual.

Where I'm going with this is I've been listening to C-SPAN radio and my XM player with interviews and conversations that occurred in the White House in the 1950s and 60s.

In fact, all of Lyndon Johnson's phone conversations are there and being recorded.

And if you take a look at just regular phone conversations back in the 50s and 60s, and then today, you can see a very distinct difference in the levels of motivation and the levels of interest that people have in everyday lives.

It was far greater back in the 50s and 60s than it is now.

And now when you see even politicians talking to each other on the phone, if you would do a comparison there, back in the 50s and 60s, they would have picked up right away that there's something wrong with those individuals.

But yet it's become so much of the norm for people to have symptoms like this, that we actually think it's part of normal human psyche, and it really isn't.

Now, this is where people are more irritable than they used to be, but the DSM-IV also states that you have symptom number 3 if you have psychomotor retardation.

That means a slowing of your muscle movements.

And most people with psychomotor retardation can't diagnose that in themselves.

The only way they could see it is if they saw a video of themselves at a family reunion going across the lawn to pick up a ball or something, and then they'd say, is that me?

It doesn't look quite normal, but when they're doing that themselves, they don't recognize it.

And many people with major depression have insomnia, even more frequent than insomnia is being able to go to sleep, but then having early morning awakening.

And then some people will just be sleepy all the time.

We have people that come to our depression recovery programs that will sleep 20 hours a day and have been doing so for months.

They're barely awake enough to maintain themselves as far as enough food and enough hygiene, and that's about it.

That's all that they can accomplish in a day's time.

And so we get into the other side of sleep disturbances as well, and either 1 would qualify.

And of course, many people with depression actually self-medicate with food.

Chocolate is 1 of the big ones, because chocolate actually temporarily raises the dopamine levels.

They actually are trying to use it as an antidepressant.

Not only tastes good, but it does change brain chemistry temporarily.

The problem with it is you also have a nadir in dopamine levels that occurs afterwards.

That's the difference between watching a beautiful sunset and eating chocolate.

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Reaching and Regaining Peak Mental Performance

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