Greek Australian Dr Despina Ganella, a postdoctoral fellow at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, is studying ways to help the teenage brain forget. She spoke to Greek Program and to Panos Apostolou for her research:
"Stress is normal, and having some anxiety is normal and there is a reason we have it.
Βut anxiety disorder is when your fears you’re having that aren't a threat but the impact on your everyday life and you start avoiding going to work or going to school or going to a party because you have a fear that is uncontrolled ed. Being nervous is very normal, being nervous for instance before you give a talk [anxiety] is very normal but if you're so nervous that you stop going to work that's probably anxiety.
I guess that makes sense not because you’re a student. What we’re finding in our research is that adolescents, so the age where you are in high school and even earlier, is when your brain is undergoing very dramatic changes in areas that are important in controlling emotions in making decisions and learning and memory. We think that during this time your brain is not working as efficiently as it would in adulthood to make you more prone to developing anxiety during this time.
At the moment, in my research, we’re trying to understand the adolescent brain. And to understand where it is not working as efficiently as it could be. Currently, the clinical research shows that the best way to overcome anxiety is through exposure therapy. you can do that with a psychologist, something like cognitive behavioural therapy is a term that they use for these exposure based therapies.
It's basically the underlying mechanism is that you have a new memory that something is fearful. So you develop anxiety around this idea, this memory. So for example, if you are in a car accident you might develop and anxiety around being in a car or driving.
The brain search shows that the best way to overcome that is to go through a series of exposure therapy where you make a new memory that the car is safe, that getting in the car is not gonna lead to an accident you could start by just sitting in the car and then driving around as a passenger in a car before moving to driving . Adolescents aren’t very good at learning this new memory. That's why we need to understand adolescent brain because they might need more exposure therapy than with the adults.
It never finishes. we are always trying to understand things. Once we understand it in a rat, we wanna understand it in a human man. That's the nature of research: we’re always just trying to better understand and then improve the therapies out there and then improve the knowledge bank of how the brain works because the brain is the most complicated organ of the human body."
