Status of Women committee  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

Status of Women committee  There are two really important points in what Michelle just said. The first one is that we do know, from studies we've done, that anyone who's working with children, teens and young adults today is extremely stressed. What we have found at all of the institutes we run is that we

Status of Women committee  Again, it's a great question. What Michelle is pointing to is the fact that our numbers are so overwhelming that we need to be thinking in terms of a universal approach. That's why she's itemized things like schools, or any organizations or parenting groups. What we have to do i

Status of Women committee  If I was going to give you one single message, it would be this. I've done this now my entire adult life. I've seen thousands and thousands of kids. I have never seen a bad kid. There isn't such a thing. If a kid is overstressed, it's a warning sign for us. This kid needs help, a

Status of Women committee  Forgive me for answering in English. I couldn't find my translation button. Both Debbie and Jaime have identified something very important. We know the data tells us that these pride centres have this beneficial effect. As neuroscientists, we're always asking why. Here, the “why

Status of Women committee  The problem they have is that, in isolation, they cannot reduce their stress, and here is a very interesting phenomenon. When stress is very high, it shuts down our self-awareness. It shuts down our feelings. Now we have the compound problem that they're feeling anxious but they

Status of Women committee  I'm sorry. I don't understand.

Status of Women committee  That's why I didn't understand. I haven't done that.

Status of Women committee  You're exactly right. My older son is on the spectrum. The very first thing we did was get him a service dog. We now know that what the dog does is trigger oxytocin. Oxytocin shuts down the stress response. The problem with PTSD is that the victim has what's called a kindled or

Status of Women committee  You've done your homework, Anna. What the medication does is suppress the physical symptoms of an anxiety attack. It slows the heart. It slows galvanic responses. It does nothing to stop the mental side. It does nothing to stop the stress itself. The dog does. Here what we fi

Status of Women committee  We need more dogs.

Status of Women committee  One of the questions we have to be asking is why these young or older males are doing it. One of the problems we see is, again, that there is a system very deep inside the brain. It's called a seeking system, and when it becomes aggressive, it's called predatory aggression, and i

Status of Women committee  Of course it does, but the problem is that, as data coming out of the U.S. tells us, at least 50% of adolescents are having these problems, and it's probably considerably more, so we need to be thinking in terms of a universal model. Our problem is that they are living at a time

Status of Women committee  Leah, you had a good professor. Yes, we do. We distinguish among three levels of the brain. We call them blue brain, red brain and grey brain. The red brain is the part below the surface, the part that has the limbic system—our emotions and things like that. All of those stresse

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. We do an awful lot of work in the far north. The basic thing we've learned is that we cannot have this kind of individualistic focus. We can't look at the mind as this solitary thing. We're seeing entire communities that are in red brain. In fact, if we look south of