[Applause] in my early 20s I was in an abusive relationship it was unsafe emotionally and physically but it was all that I knew after about 2 years I started to disconnect from myself and I lost touch with who I was the only thing that kept me going was my desire to transfer to the University of San Francisco to study Psychology and Neuroscience I thought that if I could just escape to a new city start a new life that I would be okay and I could just leave the past behind thankfully I was accepted so I
packed up and I moved 70 miles into a new city with my dog toddy into an adorable apartment I Found the courage to cut off all contact with my abuser and tody and I started our new life I remember wondering when would the feelings of Freedom start to sink in as a freshly single woman in a new city a new school when would I start to feel like myself again as the weeks and months went on I continued to wonder I started experiencing high levels of physical and emotional stress my brain felt like a static
ball of loose ends everything firing at once my body rebelled as I wasn't eating or sleeping and I replayed the abuse over and over and over again everything felt wrong and I spent the next year in this State progressively getting worse constantly in fight or flight and I didn't know what to do this level of suffering became intolerable so much for my fresh start so then one day I'm in one of my psychology courses and we're going over the dsm5 the diagnostic and statistical manual for mental disorders and we have an assignment on post-traumatic stress
disorder so I'm looking over the diagnostic criteria for for PTSD and I come across a few case studies that seem to tell my story to mimic my experience so at the end of class that day I nervously approached my professor and I asked for help and this was the moment that my healing began and also wear my interest in the neurobiology of trauma and PTSD blossomed so today I'm speaking to you as a survivor of abuse and PTSD the neurobi ological effects of PTSD cannot be underestimated and I hope to bring light to the prevalence
of PTSD in women who have experienced abuse how this impacts the brain and how we as a community can better support those who are struggling so I hope that my story and this research can help you or someone that you love let's start by understanding what PTSD is so PTSD is developed in people who have experienced or witnessed a severe trauma like threat of death Serious injury sexual violation this can be a single event like a major car crash or the exposure to repeated traumatic events like having an abusive parent partner or being a first
responder so this can happen to anyone so let's now talk about some of the symptoms associated with PTSD so people will experience heightened arousal this can present as anxiety exaggerated startle response and this will often be accompanied by physical symptoms such as trembling excessive sweating rapid heart rate people will re-experience their trauma in intrusive thoughts negative flashbacks and Nightmares there are significant negative mood changes that occur as well as avoidance of anything reminiscent of the trauma so to be clinically diagnosed with PTSD these symptoms need to be present for longer than within a month and
need to be severe enough to interfere with daily life so women are two to three times more likely to develop PTSD and this is because of the types of traumas that women face one in three women will experience intimate partner violence and or sexual abuse at some point in their life and 50% of these survivors develop PTSD so now let's start by understanding some of the brain structures involved in PTSD so the prefrontal cortex is in our frontal lobe this is considered our personality Center it is critical in our complex thinking our self-control and initiation
of behavior it has a top- down control of other brain regions and it is crucial in regulating our response to fear the amydala is in our lyic system in our temporal lobe this is crucial in processing emotion and and linking emotion to memory its major job is to sense threat and initiate survival Instinct like fight or flight the hippocampus is also in our lyic system in our temporal lobe it is crucial in processing emotion learning and storing memory it encodes and consolidates new information and will move short-term memory into long-term retrievable memory so now that
we understand some of the functions of these structures let's talk about what they look like in action so the prefrontal cortex and a normal functioning brain exerts a top- down control of the amydala this means that when we experience fear its job is to regulate the amygdala's response depending on how it perceives the level of threat for example when we see a spider our amydala senses the threat and either our prefrontal cortex will realize it's harmless and inhibit the amigdala response or it will realize it's very scary the prefrontal cortex will tell the amydala to
get to work the amydala contacts other brain regions to release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol and this is our fighter flight the hippocampus will encode and organize these memories and then once the spider is gone we can return to Baseline this is a normal response to fear so what does this look like in PTSD well researchers have found that people with PTSD their prefrontal cortex is hypoactive meaning it is lacking activity whereas the amydala is hyperactive it is overactive so why does this happen when a trauma is disruptive enough the amydala can get stuck in
fight or flight rhythmically alerting the body to stay on guard even when there is no threat present this constant flood of stress hormones eventually weakens the prefrontal cortex and it loses that top down control so the amydala is now dominant this is also known as amydala hijack it's like putting pedal to the metal on your car's accelerator when you don't have to to then realize you have no bricks it's a pure state of panic so meanwhile the hippocampus is working on overdrive it's trying to log all of the memories associated with the trauma while also
being flooded with these stress hormones researchers have found that the constant flood of these stress hormones cause volume changes and remodeling in the hippocampus so the cells in our brains are called neurons they send and receive signals the structure of these neurons include dendritic branches and dend itic spines these are essential in neuronal functioning and connectivity so in this overdrive in the hippocampus they found that the excess stress causes an actual reduction in the length of the branches complete loss of the dendritic spine and an impairment in neurogenesis which is our ability to grow new
neurons so PTSD is a disruption of the entire system it remodels and rewires the brain and this can become chronic this can be a silent killer but I wouldn't be up here today if this was it our brains are amazing organs they're vulnerable yet resilient so plasticity is our brain's ability to grow and reorganize neural networks so these impaired systems they can heal but not without a lot of work so they found that the most effective way to treat PTSD it's by treating the entire system this is brain and body so this looks like a
combination of medication like anti-depressants to help reground the body with intensive therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy to help modify our thoughts and behaviors EMDR eye movement desensitization reprocessing is the use of lights and our eye movement with intensive therapy to reframe the way that our brains process the trauma and help us process it differently so each one of these treatments had a crucial role in my recovery but one of the most important things during my recovery the most helpful was understanding what my brain was going through it helped to release the shame and the confusion
if it weren't for my education in Psychology I wouldn't have known what I was going through I didn't know that I could get PTSD there's a stigma that PTSD happens to people who are in war and combat not in our mothers or our friends or our teachers but it does and we need to start talking about it so as a community we can raise awareness to the prevalence of PTSD who it affects and how it impacts the brain we can educate each other to be more trauma informed and normalize asking for help this is not
something to be ashamed of this is something to be taken really seriously we can help reduce the stigma by bringing awareness to the prevalence of abuse and PTSD in women and we can continue to advocate for better access to mental health care and resources like support groups for survivors of abuse so I encourage you to donate or volunteer at your local women's shelter you can educate yourself on the signs of abuse and if you see something say something pay attention to your people you might know someone who is suffering from abuse or PTSD and if
this feels relatable to you I hope you now know that this does not have to be a life sentence and you can do this thank [Applause] you
