Archive for ADD (ADHD)

Today in Brain Training: Peace in the Middle of the Anxiety Storm…

A client reports, after 10 sessions, that her appetite for food and life have opened up again, she’s now enjoying quality sleep without the aide of any medicines, and she’s got a calm sense of confidence even though she’s navigating through a very difficult personal matter (storm). Here is her survey report:Screen Shot 2015-09-29 at 2.59.25 PM

Posted in: ADD (ADHD), Anger, Anxiety, Brain Mapping, Brain Training, Brain Wave Optimization, Concentration, confidence, Depression, Fatigue, Focus, Health & Exercise, Memory, Neurofeedback, Panic Attacks, PTSD, Sleep Issues, Stress, Trauma, Weight Issues

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Breast Cancer Awareness Month

For the entire month of October, receive a 10% discount and 10% of what you spend will be donated to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

BCA Month Email Blast (2)

Posted in: ADD (ADHD), Addiction, Anger, Anxiety, Bi-Polar, Brain Mapping, Brain Training, Brain Wave Optimization, Chronic Pain, Concentration, Depression, Fatigue, Focus, Fybromyalgia, Health & Exercise, Neurofeedback, Panic Attacks, PTSD, Sleep Issues, Stress, Tourettes Syndrome, Trauma, Uncategorized, Weight Issues

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Teenage and Young Adult Denial – Adderall

It’s part of being a teenager: To believe that one is immortal and “because you can get a prescription for it, amphetamine-like drugs like Adderall, can’t really hurt you.”

Wrong.

New findings in animal research presented at neuroscience 2010, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience held in San Diego in November, show that amphetamine abuse during adolescence permanently changes brain cells. The study showed that drug exposure during adolescence, but not young adulthood, altered electrical properties of brain cells in the cortex.

While many children and teens with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) benefit from taking these medications when closely supervised by parents and physicians, other teens, particularly adolescents 12 to 17 years old, a period when the brain continues to develop and mature.

Researchers a the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, repeatedly treated adolescent and young adult rats with the drug; in adulthood the rats’ pre-frontal cortex, a region important in memory, decision-making, and impulse control, were examined.

Researchers found abnormal responses to electrical stimulation and insensitivity to the brain chemical dopamine in adolescent – but not young adult – rats. The researchers noted that because brain cells communicate using both electrical and chemical signals, these findings may indicate drug induced disruptions in brain functions.

Earlier research, presented at the October annual meeting of the Society for Neurosciences in Chicago, found deficits in working memory in adult rats exposed to amphetamines in adolescents. “Our new findings reveal that this change in cognitive behavior may be due in part to long-lasting changes in the function of neurons in the pre-frontal cortex,” reported senior author Joshua Gulley, PhD. “We hypothesize that this is due to amphetamine disrupting the normal processes of brain development.”

Gulley, who led an earlier study with graduate student Jessica Stanis, also reported that “Animals that were given the amphetamine during the adolescent time period were worse at tasks requiring working memory than adult animals that were given the same amount of amphetamine as adults. This tells us that their working memory capacity has been significantly altered by that pre-exposure to amphetamine.”

Francis J. (Skip) Flynn, Psy. D.

Posted in: ADD (ADHD)

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Is your Child (or spouse) Addicted to Video Games?

Here’s a parental kick-in-the-gut from Douglas Gentile, Iowa State University assistant professor of psychology :

“The national prevalence of pathological play among youth gamers, and it is almost 1 in 10… What we mean by pathological use is that something someone is doing — in this case, playing video games — is damaging to their functioning… It’s not simply doing it a lot. It has to harm functioning in multiple ways.”

And, if you’re a parent of a game-playing 17 or 18 year old getting ready to pack-up and head off to college, you just might want to run out to the local Barnes & Noble or Borders, quickly read Ryan Van Cleave’s Unplugged: My Journey Into the Dark World of Video Game Addiction (Health Communications, Inc., 2010).

In a national Harris Poll survey of 1,178 Americans (ages 8-18), Gentile found nearly one in ten to be “pathological players” according to standards established for pathological gambling – causing family, social, school or psychological damage because of their video game playing habits. Gamers were classified as “pathological” if they exhibited at least six of the eleven criteria in the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Pathological gamers played video games 24 hours a week – about twice as much as non-pathological gamers; were more likely to have video game systems in their bedrooms; reported having more trouble paying attention in school, received poorer grades in school, had more health problems, were more likely to report that they feel “addicted,” and even stole to support their habit. Pathological gamers were also twice as likely to have been diagnosed with attention problems – Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

If you’re already saying, “Nah, not me” or “Not my kid,” read Unplugged.

Because suicide is highly correlated with the desperation stage of gull-blown gambling addiction, it is no small coincidence that Unplugged opens with Van Cleave’s sort-of-accidental almost suicide and then traces the development of an addiction that brought him to the Arlington Memorial Bridge on December 31, 2007.

With a PhD in American Literature and a background as a well-published writer and poet, Van Cleave’s memoir presents him as a quite full-of-himself combination scallywag, scamp and all-out-gaming addict. Despite his education, teaching positions in major universities that other would-be writing professors would cut off their left arms for, marriage and children, he was – and still is – a full-out addict to the game World of Warcraft (WoW) albeit in recovery.

Parents and spouses of children, teens and adults whose lives are controlled by the desire/need to be at their keyboard day and night in order not to lose their ephemeral gaming wins would do well to read Unplugged.

Despite two years out of WoW when Unplugged was written and published, Van Cleave makes it clear that the game is designed to not just to draw in the player but to keep him/her trapped forever – unlike earlier computer based games WoW and other MMOGs – massive multiplayer online games – and MMORPG – massive multiplayer online role-playing games – are impossible to win and never end. While providing a sense of “community” or “team” to “guild” members, they also trap players with the sense that the longer he is away from his screen and keyboard the more action he is missing and his community might move on without him – leaving him alone in the hostile world of the game and without the social community that has come to replace family and friends.

In addition, addicted gamers can find themselves trapped in a cycle of ever increasing costs – not just the monthly subscriber fees but trinkets and tchotchkes but imaginary weapons, imaginary money and imaginary powers. Surprisingly (for the non-gamer) it’s just as possible for a gamer to spend himself into debt and bankruptcy as it is for a chronic gambler in Las Vegas.

The Brain Training Centers of Florida utilizes the revolutionary new technology to help relieve adults and children of their addictions.

Francis J. (Skip) Flynn, Psy. D.

Posted in: ADD (ADHD), Addiction

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