Retraining the Brain

From:  Kingston Life   

For Andy Godin, 20 years as a combat engineer on missions to Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo had taken its toll. Returning to Canada to serve as a warrant officer responsible for more than 40 military and civilian personnel, he says he ended up in such dire straits he was at the end of his military career “just counting pencils.”

   

“Soldiers are trained to be task-oriented with the mission before all else,” says Godin. “With that singular focus, stuff piles up only to explode later. When my service ended, I had no idea what the hell everything else was. Normal life was strange.”

   

Godin was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder that is often accompanied by deadened or volatile emotions, flashbacks, nightmares, depression, anxiety, rage, insomnia and substance abuse. In recent years, as more becomes known about the disorder, the military has taken further steps to support soldiers with PTSD or operational stress injury with counselling and peer-support groups.

   

After Godin was diagnosed, his doctor, psychiatrist Dr. Janet McCulloch, suggested neurofeedback, a treatment that measures and affects brain activity. “I thought it was something out of a ‘sci-fi’ novel, but I had not much else going for me. I was desperately ill,” says Godin.

   

Godin says neurofeedback has “cut the edges off the bad times” and although sometimes he can still feel negative emotions coming on, he now can pick up the signals and is able to “slow it all down before going off the deep end again.”

In Kingston, treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder is changing in a remarkable way. Nestled in behind the HSBC Bank on Princess Street, the Kingston Institute of Psychotherapy and Neurofeedback (KIPN), operated by psychiatrists Dr. Janet McCul­loch and Dr. Linda Beckett, has been utilizing the technology of biofeedback in a 21st-century application, offering a type of fitness workout for the brain.

   

In the clinic’s seven training rooms, patients relax in recliner chairs as technicians fasten electro-encephalogram wires to various points on the scalp and ears to “capture” brainwave patterns, which are fed to a computer. That information is then displayed back to patients as they listen to music and watch fractals displayed on a screen. When the computer detects turbulent brainwave patterns, the patient will hear sounds akin to the needle-skipping sound of static on old-fashioned vinyl records.

   

“When the patient hears this static, they are alerted to the turbulence and automatically adjust their patterns,” says Dr. Janet McCulloch. “It is not unlike if you are driving along on the highway and you drift into the rumble strips and automatically correct your lane orientation.”

   

This new approach is the result of recent neuroscience research that shows brainwaves can be altered through practice and repetition. “We no longer see the brain as hard-wired in a way that is permanent. Now, the brain is seen as a neuroplastic organ, capable of changing its own pathways and structure,” says McCulloch.

   

According to Dr. Linda Beckett, the brain is amazingly adaptable. Researchers have found that for any given situation, the brain exhibits a normal brainwave pattern. Healthy and regulated nervous systems will react with the appropriate patterns. A person experiencing a variety of psychological or circumstantial difficulties may not have a regulated brainwave response, something called dys-regulation. Neurofeedback addresses problems of brain dys-regulation, an underlying cause of many complaints  MORE.