safety signals – NIH Director's Blog (original) (raw)
Creative Minds: Helping More Kids Beat Anxiety Disorders
Posted on July 21st, 2016 by Dr. Francis Collins
Dylan Gee
While earning her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, Dylan Gee often encountered children and adolescents battling phobias, panic attacks, and other anxiety disorders. Most overcame them with the help of psychotherapy. But not all of the kids did, and Gee spent many an hour brainstorming about how to help her tougher cases, often to find that nothing worked.
What Gee noticed was that so many of the interventions she pondered were based on studies in adults. Little was actually known about the dramatic changes that a child’s developing brain undergoes and their implications for coping under stress. Gee, an assistant professor at Yale University, New Haven, CT, decided to dedicate her research career to bridging the gap between basic neuroscience and clinical interventions to treat children and adolescents with persistent anxiety and stress-related disorders.
Tags: 2015 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, adolescents, amygdala, anxiety, anxiety disorders, behavior, brain, brain development, brain imaging, child health, children, clinical psychology, cognition, conditioning, fear, hippocampus, memory, mental health, MRI, neuroscience, phobia, prefrontal cortex, psychiatry, psychotherapy, safety signals, sensory cues, stress