By the time Betty found the Scottsdale Neurofeedback Institute, she was desperate. A once-successful architect, Betty was bright, personable and level-headed. But she was also so anxious about germs and contamination and so burdened by Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that she could no longer work or even leave her house. Only in her mid-40’s, Betty was looking at a dismal future filled with isolation and fear.
No medicine or combination of medications had worked for her, so she didn’t have particularly high hopes when she met Robert Gurnee, director of the Scottsdale Neurofeedback Institute. She knew, though, that she had nothing left to lose and everything to gain.
Gurnee is used to being the last resort for patients with OCD, depression, ADD, dyslexia, and even strokes, alcoholism and head injuries. The technology he uses is Quantified EEG Topographic Brain Mapping, in which a patient’s brain is electricity is measured, mapped and then compared to the readings of people with normal brain waves and no mental health problems. Once the abnormal areas of the brain are located, the patient uses a sort of hands-free video game to retrain their brain waves.
Like a large majority of patients Gurnee has seen since implementing this technology more than seven years ago, Betty’s brain waves and her entire life, really, were turned around thanks to SNI and the 25-year-old technology of EEG Neurofeedback.
“She had been on every medication and to numerous university psychiatric institutes for 30 years, none of which have helped her,” Gurnee says, “We trained her abnormal brainwaves down through video games, and after 25 sessions she was working again. Today, more than a year later, she is still doing fine, without medication and the side-effects she had from them.”
Subjects’ brain waves are painlessly retrained when they play a video game. For example, a figure of Superman on a screen will fly only when a patient uses their brain, not their hands, to control him. Gurnee says that the number of sessions needed varies, and the cost in the long run is cheaper than medication.
Once treatment is complete, says Gurnee, no follow-up sessions are needed. While the treatment sounds almost too good to be true, Gurnee says the technology is really quite simple and has been proven effective in numerous research studies for a variety of disorders.
“It is rewarding to me that we are helping people with previously untreatable disorders to make rapid and dramatic progress,” he says. “Because of what we do, people are able to succeed in school and at work, improve their relationships and know for the first time in a long time what it means to be normal and without worry or anxiety. They are free to live their lives again.”