Veteran Jonathan Warren: Seeing My Struggles on an EEG

When I first went in there I had already had five CT scans, five MRIs, because every time you get blown up they run you through and make sure that you’re okay and give you this check, you’re good to go back to combat and I go, okay, great. So I was very nervous going into the Brain Treatment Center because I thought, well, you’re just going to show me that my brain is fine and now I really am a bad person doing bad things. So it was really scary and nerve wracking. What they did is they put an EEG on, so that’s a cap that goes on your head. It looks like an astronaut cap. Had me close my eyes for ten minutes and recorded my brain activity. So they just wanted to see how well my brain was communicating with itself, if you will. So in my case it came back and the doctor sat down with me and he said, oh, my goodness, he said, you’re asleep right now. I said, I'm talking to you right now, I'm not sure … and he showed me my brain and my entire frontal cortex was what you would find in a deep sleep. So when you’re in a deepest sleep you’re not dreaming, you’re not moving, your body’s kind of paralyzed in that sense. So a large portion of my brain that’s responsible for higher executive functions just wasn’t in my favor. So I was on an emotional roller coaster every day, I was exhausted every day. I was frustrated. I was irritable. I was anxious, randomly cry. I mean, it just did not make sense what was going on. So for me to be actually able to see that, what was happening took a huge weight off my shoulders where I just thought, ah, I'm not crazy, there is something wrong and we can hopefully fix it. I wasn’t sure if they could or not, but I at least now knew that there was something that we can target and gave me a new trajectory for trying to find healing. This video was produced by BrainLine thanks to generous support from the Infinite Hero Foundation.