Dr. Daniel Amen's Blood Brains
this week's research rabbit hole ends up being about blood sacrifice somehow I'm sorry
I’m working on a video about those clearly AI-generated ads for ADHD types, which is also going to be about the ADHD industry at large, and I’ve spent most of this week researching. I fell down a particularly interesting hole about Dr. Daniel Amen — the source of these supposed 7 types of ADHD — who I’ve actually been meaning to write about for a very long time now. I’m not sure how much of this I’ll include in the video, but here’s an infodump for paid subscribers!
Amen is a very interesting character — you could call him a doctor to the stars. He’s been featured on Keeping Up With the Kardashians; Bella Hadid credits him for her sobriety; he influenced Justin Bieber to install a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in his house. His schtick is that mental illnesses are really ‘brain health issues’, and he presents himself as a sort of noble pariah in his field, bravely and reasonably looking at the brain in order to treat the mind.
“What medical specialist never looks at the organ they treat?” he asks, which is sort of the hook of his sales pitch, and it could be very convincing for people who aren’t familiar with the history of psychiatry, which shifted to a focus on the brain over more psychological, Freudian approaches way back in the middle of the last century. Amen’s call to look at the brain to treat the mind is nothing new, and he uses a technology to do it that is also well-known by psychiatrists and neurologists. SPECT is a kind of brain scan that uses radioactive tracers to create colorful images that represent bloodflow in the brain, which look like this:
It is very useful for diagnosing traumatic brain injuries, strokes, and tumors, but it’s not really all that valid for diagnosing mental illnesses for a variety of reasons:1
They’re not sensitive enough to detect differences between individuals, just groups
There’s usually a lot of overlap between ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’ brain scans (and how you define what those categories mean is a whole other issue)
The tests that people do while in the scanner are not standardized, so it’s difficult to compare them for research purposes
The results are not specific — the amygdala can look similar in depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia
Amen disagrees with all this, though, insisting that SPECT is a revolutionary tool for psychiatry, and that he has been unfairly maligned by his field. Based on his massive collection of brain scans (which he is fond of bragging about), he has created his own classification system, claiming to have identified not just seven types of ADHD, but also seven types of depression, and ‘at least’ five different types of addiction.
None of this has been validated outside his own chain of Amen Clinics, though, and the scans, which aren’t covered by insurance, will cost you anywhere from $3,500 to $4,500. They’re also thorny from a medical ethics perspective — should people be exposed to radiation for a test that doesn’t have good evidence behind it for diagnosing mental illness and is not recognized as medically necessary for treatment?
Because SPECT scanners are cheaper and easier to install in an outpatient practice than an MRI machine, they have proven to be a very lucrative device for Amen to build his business around — he made $20 million in 2012, acccording to the Washington Post. He also owns a supplement company called BrainMD, which he prescribes to his patients after he — supposedly — figures out what type of depression or ADHD they have from their brain scans. A former employee told The Daily Beast:
“When I got there, I started seeing the potential from a sales mindset, and I said, this company is going to go big. Because you’re literally selling hope. And if you know how to sell it right, you’re going to make a lot of money.”
Anatomy of the Grift
Amen has a Youtube series called Scan My Brain where he invites celebrities to have their brains examined and diagnosed. As an example, let’s look at a video from 6 months ago that features Nick Cannon.
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