Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.

AMEN Australia 2018: Healing, Surviving, Thriving

<p>Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Allen Lloyd

Maintaining a Strong Faith and Dismissing Doubt

So just before arriving here, in fact, we were doing an East Coast program in Atlanta, Georgia.

It just ended and that's when I got on the plane and landed here on Wednesday morning.

But we take 20 in a program, and 19 of them came in with major depression.

The 20th had isolated anxiety, and so they have to have anxiety or depression to come into the program, or a mental illness that's connected, like OCD or something like that.

And you can see out of this, there was 123456789, 10 that had severe levels of depression.

Many of these people were on medication, some of them 4 medications.

We didn't have as many come in on benzos this time.

I think there were 2 patients that were on benzos and 2 that had recently gotten off, recently by meaning within a week of coming to the program.

We try to get them off if at all possible because our studies show our long-term success will be better when they're benzo-free.

By the way, do you have a lot of people on chronic benzos in this country?

So this is where they were at at the beginning of the program.

And as you'll see, many of these were suicidal.

And it was actually 10 days later, this is where they were.

By the way, the drug companies don't like to do the PQ9 studies because it doesn't show statistical significance.

The HAMD is where others are evaluating them.

And I'm sure some of you have put people on antidepressants and you bring them in and they say, I feel no better.

And the family says, but they are better.

And so this is why the pharmaceutical companies love to do the Ham-D analysis because if they do the patient analysis, they won't show much significance at all.

We want them not only to get better, but we want them to know that they're getting better and have objective ways in which they're feeling better.

And so these are the 9 criteria, these are evaluated based on the 9 criteria.

Each of those 9 criteria have a total of 3 potential points.

So you can see the average individual, and you might say, well, you know, case 6, not as good.

But remember, these are individuals that were also on drugs and benzos, and some of them had been depressed for 25 years.

It's gonna take a different timeframe for some of these to improve.

But notice case 8, severe at the top of the list, not even qualifying.

Case 1, many of those cases, case 16, 19, severe down to none.

So you take the average and they had it the high end of moderate in this program, down to none.

Well in the WMAR program, for whatever reason, we always have more severe cases in that program, in part because the more severe cases think that the Atlanta program is new, and they're a little nervous.

They're thinking that this 1 might not be as good as the experienced WMAR program, so people self-select off in the WMAR program that are more severe.

And we may not get it down to 4.4 in the WMAR program.

Sometimes we do, down to 3, but the average is gonna be more like 5 to 6 because they're starting higher.

Now Beck looks at depression in the way that you're thinking.

Beck was the, in fact, we have just, all of our therapists have to go through the Beck certification training.

We like the Beck model as far as the cognitive behavioral therapy.

So they're learning how to do CBT for anxiety, for depression, for suicide, and those sorts of things.

And Beck looks at it in 21 different ways on how you're thinking, as well as some physical symptoms.

And Beck has a category called not only severe, but extreme.

And you can see 3 of those cases were extreme depression.

And So they were extremists in the way they were thinking.

And 19, 1 was not depressed in the way they were thinking.

But again, on the way they're thinking, you can see the significant improvement that occurred.

The extremists, all 3 of them, went from extreme depression to not even qualifying as far as having depression in the way they're thinking now.

So the good news is they're not only getting better physically, but they're getting far better in the way they're thinking.

So the average person came even more depressed in regards to thinking, and they're down to no depression in 10 days.

Now, of course, the temptation for them at the end of this program is to think they've got it licked.

In the last 3 days, we're training them for reentry.

And then some of them, we encourage the extended support plan, where we're actually helping them through in a professional manner.

By the way, the drug companies don't like to look at this, functionality.

They are looking at it, but they don't publish on it, except if it shows benefit.

And there was 1 drug recently, a relatively new drug, that showed that 6% of people actually improve in function.

This is the drug that improves in function, none of the others do.

Well, let's see, what percent of people did it actually help?

This is, and of course, there's 4 that came in extremely difficult functioning.

In other words, they weren't able to work, they weren't able to function in the family, they weren't able to function in society at all.

Most of them had very difficulty in functioning.

They were functioning some, some not so much, and 2 were actually high levels of functioning.

You can have severe depression and anxiety with people still working every day and still functioning at the family level but still thinking of ending their life.

Far better than 6%, far better than 50%, far better than 75% of individuals improving in function.

So the average went from very difficulty functioning to not difficulty in functioning.

10, we're thinking of suicide on a regular basis.

Some were thinking about it less than a quarter of time.

Those were the 3 at the lowest scale, what we call somewhat difficult.

If you're very difficult, that means you're thinking about it half, around half the time.

And There's 3 that were thinking about it continually.

They couldn't get it off their mind, thinking of ending their life.

And this is where they were when they left.

And of course, we know how it happens in the psychiatric community.

In the psychiatric world, we're primarily training them in the psych centers safety plans so that they, instead of ending their life, they do something else, which is good.

But, and we teach them safety plans as well.

We're not against the safety plans, but we're far more interested in correcting the thoughts.

Because if you don't have the thoughts, you don't even have to worry about safety plans.

And you can see 8 out of 10 of them were no longer having the thoughts, and the 2 that were, they were just less than a quarter of the time.

So the average individual suicidality, very difficult down to 0.2.

Now if they're still thinking about it, we would recommend the extended support plan.

This is why they need to continue to go along on this.

So, anxiety, which is more difficult to treat, anxiety or depression?

Requires double, triple the dose of medicines, lot more side effects.

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Maintaining a Strong Faith and Dismissing Doubt

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