Psychiatrist: Heal thyself

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Last update - 01:37 21/04/2005

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Psychiatrist: Heal thyself

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By Shiri Lev-Ari

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He sprinkles a nice helping of olive oil on his antipasti, and orders a

decaf espresso. Studies have already proved that proper nutrition is

beneficial not only to the body, but also to the mind, and this is his

expertise - the human mind. He pulls out his laptop, ready at a moment's

notice to show the latest studies and findings on a subject he calls

" the emotion medicine. "

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The interview with him is held in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel, but he

still insists on hooking me up to an electrode that measures the

fluctuations of my heart. " I deal with materials that seem so abstract

that I have to demonstrate what it is I am talking about, " he explains.

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Within seconds, a graph of my heart rate appears on the computer screen,

giving an indication not only of the physiological state, but also of

the mental state. French psychiatrist and neurologist David

Servan-Schreiber looks pleased. The heart rate is normal. In order to

prove his theory, he asks me to carry out a simple mathematic

calculation: 1,573 minus 8.

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The cognitive effort turns the graph chaotic. Proof of the ease with

which humans become tense. In order to regulate the heart rate and

restore harmony, he gives a few pointers for proper breathing and

physical consciousness, sounding almost like a Zen teacher. The heart

rate instantly returns to normal.

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Emotion medicine

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Servan-Schreiber is in Israel this week to promote his theory about the

emotion medicine, meeting with psychiatrists and medical professionals

at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer. He doesn't look like a

revolutionary, but the idea he has been promoting in the past few years

certainly sounds it. He decided to skip over the two main solutions that

have been found in the West for mental problems: psychoanalysis and

psychotherapeutic drugs. His route to mental health does not pass

through talking or through Prozac. The body, he contends, has the

ability to heal the mind, and chronic problems such as depression,

anxiety and stress, including old residual tensions and traumas

experienced early in life. Treatment with natural methods is usually

considered to have a minor effect, providing some relief, but not a

cure, but based his findings, the results are considerable, and warrant

a rethinking of the subject.

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Servan-Schreiber, 44, was born in France, moved to the United States 20

years ago and is a professor of psychiatry at the University of

Pittsburgh Medical School. Servan-Schreiber was a pioneer in

neurocognitive research in America. He is the son of Jean-Jacques

Servan-Schreiber, founder of the French newspaper L'Express. His

father's side of the family ( " The wrong side, I know, " he says) was

Jewish - a family of rabbis that left the faith and over time became

journalists. Servan-Schreiber is also a founder of Medecins Sans

Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) in the U.S. He is married to an

American woman, and they have a 10-year-old son. He now divides his time

between Pittsburgh and Paris.

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David Servan-Schreiber lays out his beliefs in " The Instinct to Heal:

Curing Stress, Anxiety, and Depression Without Drugs and Without Talk

Therapy, " an international best-seller that has been translated into 27

languages, including Hebrew. Although psychoanalysis and drugs are in

many cases effective, in many other instances, they do not offer a

solution to the problem. The book suggests seven methods to heal the

mind through the body, all of which have been scientifically examined

and verified: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (an

effective treatment in cases of severe trauma); heart coherence, in

which the heart rate is stabilized through breathing (studies indicate

that during prayer, monks experience the most well-balanced heart rate);

setting the biological clock by natural light (which is known to reduce

depression); acupuncture (capable of blocking off pain and fear zones in

the brain); use of Omega-3 fatty acids (scientifically proven to produce

happiness and ease depression, and found mainly in fish, flax seeds,

walnuts and soybeans; it is recommended to consume them via the food

itself and not in pill form); physical exercise; and development of

emotional communication.

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Tibetan treatments

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Servan-Schreiber at times seems to use scientific terminologies to

describe the same simple ideas that may be found in New Age practices:

breathing, meditation, yoga, acupuncture, proper nutrition. But he

wields scientific studies that prove the effectiveness of these methods.

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" I spent 20 years in Canada and the United States in medical schools, I

developed a very conventional career as a scientist and psychiatrist, "

he says. " It took 20 years for me to find out that there are studies in

the scientific literature on natural approaches to treatment of

depression, anxiety and stress, which have been examined and verified. I

began using them in my practice and realized that they are even more

effective than the conventional methods, except that no one talks about

them, because it is impossible to acquire them and make money from

them. "

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Servan-Schreiber's conversion took place 10 years ago, during a visit to

Dharamsala in northern India, where he volunteered for Medecins Sans

Frontieres, treating Tibetan refugees. There he also saw traditional

Tibetan medicine in action: The diagnosis was made by feeling the pulse

in the palm of the hand and examining the tongue and the urine; the

remedy was acupuncture and herbs. Servan-Schreiber noticed that the

Tibetan treatments, at least for the chronic diseases, were at least as

successful as the Western methods, except that the Tibetan drugs had

fewer side effects and were also much less expensive.

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" I'm interested in what works, " he says. " Like every psychologist, I'm

interested in good results in a short period of time, with few side

effects. After all, the body has a natural tendency to heal itself. If

you are injured and bleeding, the bleeding stops by itself after a few

minutes without you having to do anything, and after a while you can't

even tell where the original wound was, because the skin completely

heals itself. Everyone agrees about this in regard to the body. As a

psychiatrist, I noticed that exactly like the body, our emotional brain

has a natural tendency to heal itself. "

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What is the emotional brain? The human brain, he explains, consists of

two parts - the more " developed " part, which is responsible for

consciousness, speech and thought, " but that is only the surface of the

brain, which evolution built at a very late stage, " he says. The main

part of the brain, the " animal " brain, is responsible for instincts and

reflexes and controls everything that happens in the body - heart

function, blood pressure, hormones, the digestive system, the immune

system. The emotional brain, he argues, has the inborn ability to

restore balance and good feeling.

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" If a person goes through a painful romantic separation, "

Servan-Schreiber says, " if his child is sick and he is concerned about

the child's health, if he loses someone dear to him, then it is clear

that for a while he dreams about it, can't sleep well at night, has

recurring upsetting thoughts - but after a while, for most people these

things begin to fade away. Even when serious events happen that are

etched into the brain, the individual still has a natural mechanism that

can heal them. "

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In especially tough cases, he uses eye movement desensitization and

reprocessing (EMDR), in which the eyes are moved from side to side. It

turns out that during the eye movement the emotional brain enables the

absorption of information from the present that places the traumatic

event in a new and proper context.

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Health, says Servan-Schreiber, is simply a good relationship between the

parts of the body. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, called

this pneuma; in Chinese medicine, it is called chi. The brain, he says,

is a collection of neurons linked to one another; thoughts are networks

of neurons. " You're asking me if I at times think that this vitality

originated in the creation? I don't know. I do think that God is found

in the relationship between the organs of the body, between the

different systems. "

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On the computer screen, he shows three pac-man figures. There is no

connection between them. In the next picture, they are arranged such

that a triangle is formed between them. " Life is created when all of the

pac-mans form some sort of meaning between them. In this case, the

triangle is life, " says Servan-Schreiber. " When there is no connection

between the parts in the picture - that is death. The meaning lies in

the relationship between the parts. The medicine in which I am

interested is medicine that helps to rehabilitate the connection between

the parts of the body. "

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His treatment approach focuses on the present, and tends not to pry into

the past. This strongly contrasts with psychoanalysis, in which the

basic premise is that most mental troubles are formed in the first years

of life, when the individual is by and large helpless. Servan-Schreiber

presents a highly optimistic approach that does not take into account

this sort of mental determinism.

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" When we are babies, we do not know how to govern our emotions, so we

have to be in contact with someone with a better ability to govern the

emotions, and he or she shows us how to do it. However, later on we can

learn to do it by ourselves and to reclaim control of our emotions. I

have had patients who suffered from anger, anxiety and panic attacks,

who learned to enter a state of heart rate coherence. We helped them

digest their emotions and get a perspective. So there is still a lot of

hope. "

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No backing

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If the methods proposed in the book are so effective and inexpensive,

why aren't they being used in hospitals?

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" Some of these methods, like EMDR, have been proven to work, but we

don't really understand how. The psychologist in me is happy only

because it works, but the scientist in me is unhappy, because I don't

know how it works. Most of my colleagues are bothered by this, it seems

silly to them to tell people to move their eyes from side to side. "

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The other, and perhaps most important, reason is that these natural

methods do not have the backing of a money-based industry, and nobody in

the West is promoting them. " There is no one handing out colorful

brochures to psychiatrists and selling them something, " he says. " But

acupuncture really can help in depression and in anxiety. There is a

Harvard University study that shows that if you stick a needle into the

hand between the thumb and the index finger in a spot in which people

have been claiming for 5,000 years stores anxiety, then it extinguishes

the specific area in the brain that is responsible for anxiety. That is

impressive. We are not completely expert in the mechanism, but it

happens. Right now, I am not aware of a single Western country in which

acupuncture is used to treat anxiety and depression in hospitals. In my

opinion, this is not logical. "

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We are what we eat

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In its present state, Servan-Schreiber believes that the world

encourages depression and anxiety. He enumerates three primary factors

that promote depression. The first is diet. " What we eat builds parts of

our brain. Omega-3 fatty acids, for instance, are very important, and

they have nearly disappeared from our diet. We eat eggs, meat, milk,

cheeses, butter - but none of these have any Omega-3 fatty acid.

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" The second factor is that none of us have learned how to govern our

emotions. When you are seething with anger, losing control, when you are

in a state of anxiety or tension, nobody teaches you to identify it, or

to deal with it. Conversely, the consumer society is constantly sending

the message - if you buy this thing or do that thing then you will be

happy. A consumer society has no interest in teaching you that you will

be happy if you learn to control your body and your emotions, because

then we would not have to buy anything. The consumer society causes you

to believe that happiness lies in the acquisition of things from the

outside; we only learn how to run away from the emotions. "

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Now you're sounding like an Indian guru.

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" That's a little frightening... But it reminds me of a book written by

an Indian researcher, called `Flow.´ He studied which activities made

people happy. He outfitted them with pagers that were hooked up to their

brainwaves and which beeped in accordance with what they were doing.

They only had to write what they were doing each day and what they felt.

It turned out that the thing they did the most was watch television, but

they didn´t feel any happiness when they watched television. They

spent a lot of time shopping, but that didn´t make them happy, either.

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" The activity that makes people happy is basic things like being with

friends and favorite people, playing games, like cards. The problem is

that it doesn't force them to spend money, so you won't see

advertisements in the street calling out to you to spend more time with

people you like.

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" The third cause of depression is our attitude toward one another. One

study conducted in France found that 90 percent of people hit their

children. Nobody teaches us to resolve conflicts, what to do when we

disagree with something, when somebody hurts us. Either we are

over-aggressive or we are passive. "