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    Neuroplasticity- Biology of Psychotherapy
    Neuroplasticity- Biology of Psychotherapy
    Neuroplasticity- Biology of Psychotherapy
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    Neuroplasticity- Biology of Psychotherapy

    By Herman Medow

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    About this ebook

    Neuroplasticity refers to recent discoveries in brain science about an unusual capacity of our brain; it makes durable changes in its own internal biology as part of any learning experience. The spin-off from these discoveries is immense, disrupting decades of accepted wisdom that has dominated understanding of brain biology as well as beliefs about mental illness and how it is best treated. The book is addressed to professionals, as well as to the many consumers who seek help in coping with distressing symptoms of thinking, behavior and emotions.
    For as long as we have known that there is a brain, people have been learning about how the brain influences biological processes in other body systems. What is new is discovery that 1) the brain makes durable changes in its own internal biology with every learning experience and 2) that changes involved in some learning experiences , will correct brain defects implicated in some psychiatric disorders. You will read about a landmark project in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry that demonstrated these effects. You will gain understanding of how all psychotherapy includes a learning core that empowers a client to think and behave in ways that fit the design purposes of our brain system. Yes, approaching the brain as a system is another novelty, as scientists reap the advantages offered by brain imaging technology.General Systems Theory has been influencing advances in science,engineering and other areas for more than six decades. Somehow, treatment interventions for both physical and mental health have proceeded as if the elegant set of integrated systems in the human body was irrelevant. There are notable exceptions. The UCLA group is one such exception. Some folks have complained that our health care systems are too focused on illness, rather than on health promotion. They are wrong. Treatment and research for mental illness has been dominated by millions of scripts and billions of dollars for products and protocols to alleviate distressing symptoms. Diagnoses of illness is often reduced to a technical label for a cluster of symptoms. A central principle of systems theory is that all systems are designed to achieve specific goals. Different systems will exhibit different goals. However, fixing an identified symptom that is involved in a system, is certain disaster, if treated as an independent factor. This is why a chemical to simply reduce anxiety comes with a bucket of “side effects” and financial costs headed to the stratosphere.The UCLA team considered symptoms as signs of brain system disruption. Focus of treatment was identifying the biology malfunction and what was causing it, then practice with skills that normalized activity levels in the brain system. Observed symptom remissions coincided with (f)MRI images of brain changes. The UCLA project unhinged the longstanding de facto division of labor, which was separation of “talk therapies,” offered by Psychologists, Counselors, Social Workers and related professionals, from Medical treatments with drugs or other chemicals. The former conventionally seen as helping clients learn how to think and behave in ways that meet their needs more effectively. Medicines are proposed to correct biological problems in the brain. The UCLA project means discarding the rationale for the division of labor. So-called talk therapies are more realistically termed “learning therapies.” Even more telling is that the project team actually relied on imaging to demonstrate healthy brain changes. So far as I know, the FDA requirement for evidence of benefit when approving a medication, such as an antidepressant, is some degree of remission of symptoms per the DSM, not evidence for correcting a brain malfunction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHerman Medow
    Release dateApr 27, 2017
    ISBN9781370223459
    Neuroplasticity- Biology of Psychotherapy

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      Book preview

      Neuroplasticity- Biology of Psychotherapy - Herman Medow

      NEUROPLASTICITY

      BIOLOGY OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

      Dr. Herman Medow

      Copyright © 2017 Herman M. Medow Ph.D.

      All rights reserved.

      Registration Number: TXu 1-712-779

      Distributed by Smashwords

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

      Contents

      Introduction

      Implications and Applications to Psychotherapy

      A Partial Summary of How Awareness of Brain Plasticity Impacts Therapy Practice

      Therapist Considerations: Connecting, Rapport, Trust

      Miscellany of Neuroscience Considerations

      Appendix

      References

      Introduction

      Some time in the 1980s, the Dalai Lama was visiting a university hospital in the United States (Begley, 2007) observing a surgery to remove a tumor from the brain of a patient. At the conclusion of the operation, the surgeon announced that the patient would be fully functioning when he recovered. The Dalai Lama voiced his understanding that a tumor in the brain would impair mental functions. However, he asked the surgeon whether or not a mental activity, a thought, could affect the physical structure of the brain. The prompt response was a definite No! There is no way mental activity can have physical effects in the brain. Some 20 years later, that no has been shown to be wrong. Years of neuroscience research support what the Dalai Lama was implicitly suggesting: Mental activity effects physical, neuroplastic changes in the brain.

      In just over two decades, developments in a branch of biology—the discipline of neuroscience—promise to enhance our understanding of mental illness and mental health, and expand our treatment strategies and tools. They are leading to a major shift in how we understand the relationships between brain biology and effects of experience. Although the impact on clinical practice has been quite limited thus far, we can actually point to more than just promise. There have been some direct applications of neuroscience findings in psychotherapy practice, and these examples are described later in this book. I am referring to three major developments. One is the advance of neuroimaging technologies allowing us to see electrical and metabolic activities in a living working brain. The second development involves the concept of neuroplasticity; imaging shows that the brain exhibits durable physical, biological changes as a result of learning. When we observe behaviors that change and persist as a result of experience, that is what we refer to as learning. What we know now, is that what we observe as learning, is accompanied by predictable biological changes that have occurred in the brain.

      The third discovery is what can be called self-directed neuroplasticity. Conscious voluntary directing of attention and practice with voluntary behaviors can produce durable biological changes in the brain. The processes of psychotherapy always involve this self-directed neuroplasticity. In the following pages, you will see detailed discussions of the ideas, the evidence and what the findings of neuroscience mean for the practice of psychotherapy. I will provide a detailed review of a major university applied research project for treating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), making use of the brain’s neuroplastic capacities. This study is a concrete example of how neuroscience findings can enhance psychotherapeutic benefit. It involves a twopronged set of objectives: reducing behavioral symptoms identified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), while normalizing metabolic activity in specific brain structures. These were achieved by exploiting the brain’s plasticity potentials—the capacity for durable physical biological changes resulting from interaction of the brain with its environment.

      The point of the following pages is to articulate the benefits of supplementing the DSM system of behavior clusters with systematic identification of relevant brain structures and processes. The closing section will review interventions that are applicable for reducing/eliminating symptoms in other Axis I disorders, in ways that also correct brain impairments. I have found this perspective, and the knowledge that comes with it, most helpful in my own professional practice. Understanding principles of how the brain learns is a most important resource to guide how we enhance healthy behavior and thinking.

      There was a time when we lacked tools to see the working, brain as we designed and used therapies for treating mental illness. The data were not accessible. Today we use tools that yield images of working brains. We can benefit from systematic findings of neuroscience studies of twenty-some years. These advances provide a knowledge base from which to devise interventions that benefit from the plasticity potentials of the brain.

      Usually, when you see a reference to biological psychiatry, you expect to read about the effects of drugs and other medications on brain biology. You can also expect to see no biological measures of brain change. Typically you find no biological data defining either impairments or improvements in brain systems. This statement holds for both clinical assessments, and research addressing therapy outcomes.

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