10 Ways Brain SPECT Imaging Changes Mental Health Care

Change Your Brain Every Day

Dr Daniel Amen

Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week's episode, Dr. Amen & Tana sit down to discuss the importance of brain SPECT Imaging for mental health care. Seeing your brain scan helps you understand that mental health issues is not a "mental" health condition, but rather a brain health issue. Psychiatrists typically diagnose mental health issues like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) based on symptoms clusters. For example, you tell your doctor you feel depressed or anxious or inattentive, so you get diagnosed with depression or anxiety or ADHD and walk out with a prescription for antidepressants or anti-anxiety pills or stimulant medication. Without looking at the brain with functional brain imaging tools, clinicians will never be able to know the underlying brain patterns of the people they treat. So they can't know the root cause of your symptoms. Since 1989, Amen Clinics has used brain imaging to help thousands of people overcome mental disorders with targeted solutions that are proven to produce higher than average success rates. We use a brain imaging technology called SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) that evaluates blood flow and activity in the brain.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Your brain matters.
0:01.7	Amon Clinics helps people with brain scans and targeted treatment across 11 cities.
0:08.4	Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, D.C., Miami, New York, Seattle, Scottsdale, Los Angeles, Orange County, California, and San Francisco.
0:19.8	Learn more at Amonclinics.com.
0:24.6	Every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn
0:31.6	how you can change your brain for the better every day. Welcome back to change your brain every day.
0:41.4	Welcome back to Change Your Brain Every Day.
0:42.6	I'm Tanna Aymann.
0:44.7	And I am Dr. Daniel Aman. After looking at nearly 300,000 brain spec scans at Aman clinics at our 11 clinics over the last, goodness, 35 years, we've learned
0:58.7	something most of psychiatry still ignores. When you look at the brain, everything changes.
1:07.5	And today we're walking you through the 10 ways that brain spec imaging changes
1:11.5	diagnosis, treatment, hope, and outcomes, not in theory, but in real people's lives. So number
1:18.2	one, it decreases shame and guilt and increases compliance. I think this is so interesting and so
1:24.4	important as a nurse. I've seen this happen. So one of the most powerful things
1:28.9	brain inspect imaging does is remove shame. People stop seeing their struggles as a moral failure
1:37.9	and start seeing them as a medical issue. So my first scan, 1991, and grand rounds at my hospital,
1:52.8	brain specter in gene in psychiatry, a new tool to help psychiatrists be more effective.
2:02.0	I loved it.
2:03.4	I was riveted.
2:05.3	I had thought for 10 years as a psychiatrist,
2:09.2	so I was as a psychiatrist for almost a decade,
2:11.7	that why are we the only medical specialists
	...

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