In her presentation “Antidotes for trauma in girls,” journalist and author Donna Jackson Nakazawa “outlines today’s growing female adolescent mental health crisis, examines how trauma affects the female brain and body uniquely, and offers hope for combating this adversity.”
For example, she notes that estrogen “is the source of the reason why the female adolescent brain is a freaking superpower…But in unhealthy or overly stressful environments – which I argue our kids are living in and especially girls – it can flip to an evolutionary disadvantage where it amps up the stress response.”
This audio is from her much longer presentation (recording available) at the Trauma Super Conference 2023.
Learn about multiple programs by Donna Jackson Nakazawa, including “Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal With Neural Re-Narrating™” and “Breaking Free From Trauma.”
One of her books: Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media.
Podcast episode: A growing mental health crisis for girls, with Donna Jackson Nakazawa
[Image at top is from podcast page: “Girls on the Brink” by Next Big Idea Club.]
Listen to more episodes of The Creative Mind Audio Podcast.
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Transcript
Megan Gibson 0:01
Welcome to this interview. I’m Megan Gibson, co host of the Trauma Super Conference. Today I’m thrilled to be speaking with Donna Jackson Nakazawa, an award winning science journalist, author of six books and an internationally recognized speaker whose work explores the intersection of neuroscience, immunology and human emotion.
Her newest book, “Girls on the Brink: helping our daughters thrive in an era of increased anxiety, depression and social media” looks at today’s growing female adolescent mental health crisis, and examines how trauma affects the female brain and body in uniquely powerful ways, and offers new hope for helping girls flourish, even in the face of adversity.
She’s also the creator and founder of the trauma healing program, “Your healing narrative, write to heal with neural re-narrating” – an online narrative writing course for practitioners, educators and individuals.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Donna.
Donna Jackson Nakazawa 0:58
Pleasure to be back with you Megan, as always.
Megan Gibson 1:02
So I’m gonna be honest with you. And I think I wrote to you while I was reading your book, I found your book super validating, and also infuriating.
Because I know the book outlines that mental health and girls today is a pretty stark, according to the research and the gap between the mental health of girls and boys is widening.
So can you walk us through some of the recent findings and set the landscape for us for this conversation?
Donna Jackson Nakazawa 1:25
Yes, sure. So I think you can add, you’d have to be living under a rock to not have seen a lot of the recent studies and news articles about the mental health of girls.
This was well in place before the pandemic, some people think it’s a pandemic related problem. And indeed, the pandemic definitely threw gasoline on an already brewing fire.
But in the past 10 to 15 years, we’ve seen that rates of depression, anxiety and self harm among girls, has skyrocketed. At the same time, the gap between the mental health of girls and boys after puberty, that gap has always been there where girls have suffered for more depression, anxiety, boys have suffered from more behavioral and attention issues.
But that gap is getting wider and wider. So we’re seeing for instance, in 2019 1/3 of girls, by age 17, were reporting a period of depression six weeks or longer, were talking symptoms of major depression, not by diagnosis, when public health researchers are looking at these questions.
They don’t just go by diagnosis, right? Because then we might think, well, maybe girls are just, you know, more willing to talk about their feelings are willing to say they’re sad or articulate it better.
No, they look at lived experience they looked at, are you able to get out of bed? Have you lost interest in activities for the last six months or more? Has this disrupted family life? What are the emotions that mark this period of time – and a third of girls by age 17, were saying that they had six weeks or more marked by a period of hopelessness, worthlessness, guilt, and despair and shame.
So we’ve seen tons of other studies, I can name 200 of them right now, after reporting the book. But by 2021, the CDC reported that the rate of girls who were attempting suicide had risen 51%, compared to 4%, among boys, we could go on.
But when you see this, you want to know what’s behind it.
Megan Gibson 3:46
Absolutely. And childhood stress we know is one of the contributors to psychiatric disorders. And one of the things that was so stark about the book was not only all of this research, and I love that you kind of put in the context of how they’re how this information was gathered.
Because if it’s just based on diagnosis, not every girl in society has access to diagnosis, they don’t have the kind of support or the kind of health care in some countries, that we can be getting diagnosis.
And that’s how we can get this kind of statistical information. And so the fact that you want to make sure everybody’s clear how this was reported and gathered, it actually matters quite a bit, right?
Donna Jackson Nakazawa 4:29
That’s right. And it also matters when we’re looking at sex differences, right? Because we know boys are suffering too.
Let me just say that before people come out as I’m the mother of a daughter, and I’m the mother of a son, and all of our kids are facing a lot of different toxic factors in the world around them. And I speak to that book, but what’s happening to girls is, you know, having read the book is a compilation of a lot of unique factors and so we have to be willing to talk thought that if we’re going to help really figure out what’s behind this trend, and really ground ourselves in what we can do about it?
Megan Gibson 5:08
Absolutely. So I know that you write that it was only in 2016, that scientists started looking at how stress affects the female brain specifically, and that before that, researchers worked only with male research models when looking at how the brain processes stress.
And I know when I read that, I was like, wait, what? Yeah, I think most people would actually be shocked to find that out. So why did it take so long to include women and girls for that matter and research? And why did these new fat factors matter? In terms of what happened? What’s happening with girls?
Donna Jackson Nakazawa 5:42
Well, it is shocking, but not surprising. So for instance, I shared with you something personal before we got on, that I recently had heart surgery.
I’ve had a few. Well, we all know it was only a few years ago, that researchers actually looked at what do her problems look like in females it had never been studied.
It’s like dummies in fake car crashes, you know, are six with two men sitting there.
So so much of research has been based on this male research model. And in neuroscience, it is no different.
So when I talk about this research, I’m talking about not epidemiology, where you look at maybe a group of 15 year old girls and a group of 15 year old boys, then you begin to ask them questions about their experience. I’m talking about research that comes way before that, in the lab, preclinical research, animal studies, were only using male research models.
And the researchers I talked to about this, told me that this was because researchers wanted to keep those pesky hormones out of it, because it would mess up the clarity of their fine games.
Well, this turns out to have a huge impact on our understanding of stress across female health and development, especially as estrogen comes in at puberty.
So why does this matter so much? Well, for those of you who like to get a little geeky and deep in the weeds, you know, stick with me, I will simplify it.
But it is a little complicated, and yet, so powerful once we get it, and it is this fact, estrogen is a superpower hormone.
Make no mistake about it. It is the reason why across evolutionary time, women who are traditionally or you know, generally speaking, in smaller bodies, we have smaller organs to make room for uterus to carry all their human life nine months.
And yet, we stay awake just as many hours a day we run, you know, just as fast. Most women are up like 11, 12 o’clock still doing laundry, while their husbands are asleep, we do more on less.
And that is thanks to estrogen. Evolutionarily speaking, estrogen is also a big immune booster. So it adds an extra layer of protection, which helps protect women who are essential to the human race, you know, carrying another life providing that warmth, that breast milk, keeping young children alive and save, and I’m talking across time, right?
That is essential for our gene pools to carry on. That said, that evolutionary boost in the face of too much stress too many what scientists call environmental insults, which include social emotional stressors, aspects of your environment that are taxing to your immune system in any which way physical or mental, then it flips to an evolutionary disadvantage.
And that is why we begin to see that women are more likely to suffer from autoimmune disease right? At several times the rate of men.
Now, on an upside, it’s why women have a more robust response to vaccines, we produce more antibodies after a vaccine.
Flipside, it’s why women have more long COVID. So estrogen is so much more than this hormone that we think of that brings in the thrum of sexual excitement across adolescence or, you know, is involved with mood, you know, mood mood switches.
It is a master regulator for the entire body, for your brain to wire and fire up across puberty in healthy ways. It helps feed your neurons and bringing growth factors and help neural synapses to connect and boom and it is in a healthy environment for girls.
It is the source of the reason why the female adolescent brain is a freaking superpower. Its spidey sense. The connections between the left and right hemisphere are just bar none on this planet.
But in unhealthy or overly stressful environments – which I argue our kids are living in and especially girls – it can flip to an evolutionary disadvantage where it amps up the stress response, which amps up the immune system in ways that play out in both physical and mental health concerns.
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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