The Brain that Changes Itself: How Breakthroughs in Neuroplasticity Can De-Pathologize Mental Health

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Dr. Norman Doidge is a curious psychiatrist. He wanted to know how neuroplasticity could serve his practice and he sets out in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, to interview and understand the work of leading neuroscientists who are using the natural neuroplasticity of the brain to heal everything from long-time post-injury paralysis to successfully managing OCD and anxiety. Along the way, we get a fascinating history of the scientific communities resistance to seeing what the data was telling them — that the brain is not immutable and doomed to downward decline with age and injury. Instead, the brain has an extraordinary capacity to grow itself, undo bad or faulty wiring, and heal and adapt itself.

Written for the lay person, Dr. Doidge nevertheless sprinkles enough understandable data and analysis to support the claims of what he calls the new “neuroplasticians.” Though the first part of the book begins in the obvious place of helping the brain repair itself after traumatic injury causing either physical debilities or cognitive like aphasia, he soon introduces breakthroughs that make a difference for learning differences and psychiatric issues that can interfere in people fulfilling their gifts and potential.

Most exciting, is the possibility of turning back the pathology of the medical model in dealing with mental health issues that nevertheless still cause too many people to live half lives of pain and suffering. Though not mentioned by Dr. Doidge here, the best way to live well having experienced symptoms of “schizophremia”  is the practice or philosophy of Open Dialogue developed in Norway, but it is largely ignored and underpracticed in the U.S. Let us hope that neuroplasticity becomes the basis of more mind/brain research sooner rather than later, and that the DSM begins to de-pathologize the human condition.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

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Lucinda Jewell
Lucinda Jewell, Ed.M., is a former director and Board Chair of the national Depression Bipolar Support Alliance, as well as a former board member and President of DBSA Boston. Previously, she was co-founder of the Boston Book Review, a bi-partisan political and literary review modeled on the Times Literary Supplement. She earned her Ed.M. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard and A.B. from Middlebury College. Since 1995, she has been a tireless educator and advocate for transforming the conversation for mental health from danger and drain to one of contribution. Consider what would be possible for those of us who have experienced mental health issues if we lived like we make a difference no matter how we feel? And, consider that there would be a missing in what it means to be human if we were not here to express it. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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