Thank you very much.
I can't help but feel that you must all be feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the absolutely frightening scope of the problems that we're facing with mental health of women and young girls today. I've been given the job of telling you—in five minutes—about an incredible neuroscientific revolution that we're going through. All I'm going to try to do is spark some curiosity, because this new understanding is giving us tools so that we can really reinforce all the messages that I've just heard, and that you've heard from your other witnesses.
I'm just going to talk about anxiety now, and essentially what we have learned, especially within the last three years. The numbers we're seeing are very difficult for us to tabulate. We know that it's far in excess of the 20% reported before the pandemic.
We know that anxiety is a warning system. It serves as a warning that the brain has detected an external threat, and that's not hard to figure out. We can certainly enumerate the threats that women are dealing with today. You just heard some very good examples.
It also serves as a warning system for internal threats, and that's what I'm going to talk about. An internal threat is something that's coming from very deep in the brain. It is coming from systems that lie beneath the threshold of awareness. Essentially what's happening is that these systems are in what's called homeostatic imbalance. Homeostatic imbalance produces things like depression, anxiety disorders, self-harm and so on.
There are three primary causes of these homeostatic imbalances.
The first one is simply excessive stress. Stress is a complicated issue, and I'll come back in one second to what a scientist means by stress. The second cause, and this is the big one during the pandemic, is maladaptive modes of dealing with that stress. Essentially, a maladaptive mode is something that gives you relief in the moment, but exacerbates the stress problem. The third cause is a lack of experiences that produce oxytocin. Oxytocin turns off the stress response.
What we see in all of the cases that you are hearing about are young women and girls who are in a state of being overstressed, something called “hypodopaminergic”. What does that mean? Stress is anything that requires the brain to burn energy to deal with that stress. It could be physical stress. It could be noise, crowds, too much light or not enough. It could be emotional stress. It could be cognitive stress. These are things that we talk about and explain.
The problem with excessive stress, such as we have seen over the course of the pandemic, is that it turns off dopamine. We need dopamine. These women need dopamine. Without it, when your dopamine levels are reduced, it causes withdrawal, as well as something called anhedonia. It causes lack of motivation—you can't go to school. It causes chronic anxiety and depression or dysthymia.
The question this raises for us is this: Given the unbelievable stresses that women and girls are under, what can we do to alleviate this? What can we do to put the brain in a state where it can benefit from the programs that you are hearing about? What we need is something that turns off the stress response.
I'll just explain this really quickly, because I can't keep track of five minutes. The problem that you have is that when there's a stressor, there are chemicals that go up to produce the energy to meet the stress. There's another set of chemicals that turn off the stress and get us back into balance. What we're seeing in anyone who is suffering from, let's say, anxiety disorder is that the two systems are out of whack, so what we have to figure out is how to get them back into balance. We can't do it by education. We can't do it—