The Mental and Physiological Health of Girls and Young Women
A Scientific Perspective for Therapeutic Work
NOW CLOSED
Friday 3 February 2023
A live webinar with Donna Jackson Nakazawa and Dr Wanjikũ Njoroge
CPD Credits: 4.5 hours
- Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 31 January
Anyone caring for girls today knows that our clients, daughters, and the girls next door are more anxious and prone to depression and self-harm than ever before. The question is, why?
READ MORE...In this seminar, award-winning science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa and Professor Wanjiku Njoroge will delve into the problems young girls face and share new evidence that uncovers how and why the mental health crisis facing girls today is a biologically rooted phenomenon that interplays with a society and culture where children seem to grow up earlier and faster. Jackson Nakazawa will speak to how the earlier onset of puberty mixes badly with the unchecked rise of social media and ongoing cultural misogyny, and how this affects girls’ health and well-being. Dr. Njoroge will address how systems of oppression, predominantly racism, affect girls across development. When this toxic biopsychosocial clash occurs during the critical neurodevelopmental window of adolescence for girls, it can alter the female stress-immune response in ways that derail healthy emotional development and harm well-being.
However, our new understanding of the biology of modern girlhood yields good news, too. Though puberty is a particularly critical and vulnerable period, it is also a time during which the female adolescent brain is highly flexible and responsive to certain kinds of support and scaffolding. Based on the latest science, Jackson Nakazawa will share a series of neuroprotective and healing strategies for how clinicians, parents, and communities can help secure a healthy emotional inner life for girls and young women.
FULL PROGRAMME
14.00 GMT
Introductions
14.10
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Growing up female today
In this session, Donna Jackson Nakazawa details startling new statistics on how girls and young women struggling today are faring, how the pandemic has poured gasoline on an already raging fire, and the modern pressures that make it so difficult for adolescent girls to thrive. She will unpack our new scientific understanding of how mounting adversities affect girls’ bodies and brains in surprising and unique ways. Donna will explain why, in the face of today’s ongoing chronic, toxic stressors, these negative effects can manifest at a biological level in distinctly different ways as boys and girls enter puberty and come of age. This, coupled with the stress that simply accompanies growing up female in our society, means it is more important as a driver of today’s mental health epidemic among girls than previously realised.
15.00
Dr Wanjiku Njoroge
How racism and discrimination get “under the sin”
As the world has been struggling with global pandemic, the United States faces an additional ongoing struggle: combating the legacy of racism on many U.S. structures, systems, and institutions. The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that racism has reached the level of a public health crisis. In this session, Dr. Njoroge will share the latest research findings indicating how how negative stressors, including race and discrimination, impact children and adolescents’ developmental trajectories. Research reflects the adverse impacts of racial discrimination and poverty on multiple emerging neurobiological processes including the developing exposome, telomere length, cortical thinning, and physiological dysfunction.
15.45
Q&A with both speakers
16.00
Break
16.15
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
New scientific understanding on why our girls are struggling
In this talk, Donna explains why girls’ rising rates of mental and physical health issues are caused not by any single recent change in their environments, but by a perfect storm of escalating factors. Participants will gain a new understanding of how the developing brain makes sense of toxic stressors as girls approach puberty. For young women, it is during puberty that the cumulation of chronic personal and environmental stressors begins to manifest its high psychological cost. Why? Donna will share the very latest on how genes interact with toxic stressors from the environment – from conception, through puberty, and into adulthood – in very unique ways for girls and females. She’ll also take you on a journey across evolutionary history to explain why puberty is such a high stakes passage for healthy brain development.
17.00
Break
17.15
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Growing our girls
The problems girls face today are entirely different from those of the past. We need to change our techniques and approaches to work with girls and young women if we are to help them flourish and thrive. Drawing on insights from both the latest science and interviews with girls about their adolescent experiences, Donna will guide you through a series of revelatory “antidote” strategies for raising and working towards emotionally healthy girls to help any teenage girl and young woman to thrive in the face of stress. This will include how to nurture the parent-child connection through the rollercoaster of adolescence, core ingredients to building a sense of safety and security for teenage girls at home, the latest research on the importance of early therapeutic interventions, and how to foster the foundations of long-term resilience in our girls so they are ready to face the world.
18.00
Discussion and Q&A with both speakers
18.30
End