We are living in an
era of crises worldwide, around one
billion people are suffering from stress-related illnesses and that
number is rising. The key to resilience
is staying healthy even when faced with
life’s great burdens. What keeps people mentally
healthy in spite of serious crises while others
break down? Resilience is a natural
phenomenon that enables people to continue developing
after they experience a catastrophe or
traumatic event. Leading researchers are trying
to identify the secret to resilience. As resilience researchers,
we aim to identify strategies that can help prevent people
from developing mental illnesses. Can we learn
to be resilient? It was as if part of me
had been ripped out. It’s the greatest loss that
a father can experience. Georg Ballmann’s son Luca was
killed here on a January evening. Luca’s mother Helen called me on
a Saturday morning just after seven. She just said one
thing: “Luca is dead”. After a birthday party at a
club, Luca and his friend Freddy, both 16, got into an argument
with another group of teenagers. They tried to
calm things down. But the situation escalated
and ended with Freddy being pushed in front
of an oncoming train. Luca was pulled
along with him. It’s a tragedy that Georg Ballmann
shares with Céline and Björn Wilke, Freddy’s parents. They all grieve
for their two sons. In 2019, the police appeared at
the Wilkes’ door early in the morning. They said we
should sit down. It was the worst sentence of my
life, really just that one sentence: Your son
died last night. And you’re sitting there at the
table, you don’t want to believe it, but you don’t say “this
can’t be happening”. It’s as if the earth is opening up
and sucking your whole soul away. That your whole
world is collapsing. The day plays out like a bad movie
and you don’t realize what’s happened. You call a few people and
then you’re sitting at home. We were lucky that friends came to
us very quickly and looked after us. I fully understand
people who can’t cope. I felt that too: why do I get
to live - but my son doesn’t? The two families have an endlessly
long and painful road ahead. Stress and even
crises are part of life. Nevertheless, many
people stay mentally healthy. The question
is how? The largest center for resilience
research in Europe is in Mainz, Germany. Here, neuroscientist and brain
researcher Professor Raffael Kalisch researches the mechanisms
of mental resilience. What is
mental health? My interest in this question
comes from my very early days as a university
student. A schoolmate and close
friend of mine had a breakdown in the first year of his studies
while I was having a wonderful time. To me it was all fascinating
and great and new. And during that time, I
watched my friend fall apart. And that made
me ask myself: Why does it happen to some
people and not to others? What are the risk
factors for mental illness? The interesting thing is
that it’s not just really big, extreme life events that
can make people mentally ill. It’s not just a serious
accident, an act of violence, or the death
of a loved one, but also minor stresses
that can affect people if they occur frequently and
over an extended period of time. What do those with
resilience do differently? To find out, Kalisch is conducting
a long-term study of healthy people who find themselves in a particularly
difficult phase of their lives. We take young people who
are in this transitional phase from family and school to adult life, that are leaving a
familiar environment. We see that in this phase
of life, stress-related illnesses tend to emerge for the first
time or, if they are pre-existing, become more severe. Every three months, the 200
participants in the study answer a questionnaire about
their mental state. To what extent have you felt more
calm or tense in the past two weeks? Sitting on a packed train on my way
home from work was a bit stressful. But in the mornings, I would
occasionally just make myself a cup of tea and relax for ten minutes
and then I was able to settle down. Because we do this
every three months, we get a very good picture of stress
levels over a long period of time. So that we can see over that
time how strongly they react psychologically
to life’s challenges. Some are affected
more, others affected less. And in the end, this
gives us a picture of what mental resilience looks like
when encountering stressors. At regular intervals,
participants come to the institute for a thorough
examination. Kalisch and his team use MRI
machines to look for indications of how mental stress is
processed in the brain. And they examine how
stress affects the body. To do this, they take
blood and hair samples. We can measure the concentration
of the stress hormone cortisol from a hair sample. One centimeter of hair typically
corresponds to one month of hair growth, so the analysis of one centimeter,
or in this case three centimeters, tells us something about the
activity of the stress hormone system over the previous
three months. The results have been logged
since the study began in 2016, so there is now a large
database of information. Ultimately we want to
understand what mechanisms people use to stay mentally
healthy in the face of adversity. And once we know these mechanisms
better, to utilise or strengthen them, especially in people who
do not succeed in doing that. The study in Mainz is
due to be finished soon. Kalisch has already identified
certain resilience factors one of which is how positively
or negatively the participants themselves assess
their stress levels. There seems to be a
connection to optimism and the fact that people
believe they can somehow cope, that it will probably
work out somehow. That seems to be
connected to resilience, so someone who cultivates this
kind of positive assessment style or develops it over time
is less likely to be affected. So can we influence
how resilient we are? Professor and Psychiatrist Marianne
Müller is also conducting research at the resilience
center in Mainz, investigating what makes
some people particularly resilient. I think this
is promising in terms of better understanding
psychiatric illnesses. For many decades, we’ve
had only moderate success in trying to understand
how psychiatric illnesses, for example stress-related illnesses
such as clinical depression, develop. While psychiatric research focuses
primarily on the clinical picture, the science of resilience is more
concerned with healthy people. Müller is first
exploring the basics: What does resilient
behavior even look like? With her colleague Ulrich Schmitz,
she is investigating this in mice. Resilience can only be
measured in the context of stress. That’s why they
put small brown mice in the cage with a much larger
and stronger white mouse. We take male mice, which, like all
or almost all other male vertebrates, show territorial
behavior. This means that if you place a
test mouse with a larger mouse in its home cage, the
larger mouse won’t accept it and will try to scare or drive it
away. This leads to social stress. The brown mouse is removed in order
to prevent it from becoming injured. The experiment is
repeated for 10 days. They want to know:
What is the long-term effect of this permanent stress on the
behavior of the stressed mice? After a day’s break, they
undertake a second experiment: The brown mice are again exposed
to the white aggressor mouse. But this time the white
mouse is in a cage. The researchers now
observe the following: How do the previously
stressed mice behave? Do they stay
away fearfully? Are they brave enough to approach
the white aggressor in the cage? We assumed that the mice were
resilient if they always investigated the white mouse a lot, as if they
had never experienced stress. However, we thought this
might not be resilience at all, but rather the result of a less than
optimal learning process over time that the test mouse
has not learned, has not understood that this white
mouse strain is potentially dangerous. If that were the case, this mouse
could not be described as resilient. So is the intrepid mouse
perhaps just too... dumb? The researchers investigate
this question in a third experiment. Here, two large mice are
placed behind bars in the cage: The aggressive white
one and a brown one, with which the stressed little mouse has had no negative
experiences so far. Our test mouse was allowed
to freely explore the box, examine and visit the different social
partners and interact with them. And we were able to
show there are mice that are able to distinguish
between the white mouse, which comes from the aggressor
strain, and the brown mouse, which is neutral and with whom it
has not had any negative experiences. Is resilient behavior about
being able to distinguish between threat
and safety? We currently see a
resilient mouse as a mouse that examines the brown
mouse in a completely normal and unimpressed manner, but keeps
its distance from the white mouse because it has learned that the
white mouse is a potential threat. We consider this a resilient
behavioral phenotype. That means resilient
behavior in mice doesn’t mean simply bravely confronting
every impending danger but rather weighing up the situation
and adapting behavior accordingly. This is directly transferable
from mice to humans. There’s a lot of data showing
that people who can distinguish between negative stimuli and
neutral stimuli are better protected against stress and associated
stress-related mental illness. In this respect, we are also
quite confident that we can use this to derive further
neurobiological findings. Moving on. Finding her
way back to life Céline Wilke tries to do this every
day after the death of her son Freddy. I said goodbye for the
last time on Friday evening, when he told
me cheerfully. “Mom, I’m off.” I told him
to have fun. That was
our farewell. I can still see him
in that moment. He was in a good mood, looking forward
to the evening with his friends. And in retrospect, I’m
glad that the last time we saw each other was
really a pleasant moment and that we said goodbye to each
other nicely without knowing that we’d never see
each other again. On the day of the funeral, the
whole town mourned with the families. Luca and Freddy are buried
together in the same grave. And then the whole congregation
walked a good kilometer here from the church in
a funeral procession. It was like
being in a trance. And the burial itself,
of course you noticed that there were a
lot of people there, but it passes you
by and somehow you don’t really have any
clear memory of the moment. And the funeral, it felt
like this whole heaviness, this coffin with
both of them, I don’t know if heaviness is the right
word - this burden, which is so heavy. Like I already described
it, the earth opens up, that someone accepts
the burden for me, that I could now pass
it in to other hands. Maybe there is a bit of
religion in me after all. The physical part will be buried
for now, but the emotional part, it will take a very long time before
this wound is no longer quite so open. Munich. Here, at the Max Planck
Institute of Psychiatry, neuroscientist Elisabeth
Binder wants to find out: Why do some people remain mentally
healthy despite severe stress, while others become ill
under the same stress? One topic we researched
was genetic predisposition. Could it be that certain people
are genetically predisposed to react more or less to stress
and are therefore more or less at risk of negative
effects later on, such as depression or
post-traumatic stress disorder? Elisabeth Binder
wants to know: Could it be a gene variant that
alters our perception of stress? To find out, she is tracking
down the hormone cortisol, an important hormone for our
metabolism and immune system that’s also released
when we’re under stress. It’s regulated by something
called the HPA Axis. When we experience
stress, the brain is activated. This sets off a complex
cascade of events. In the brain, stress signals
are sent to the hypothalamus. This in turn releases hormones that
make their way to the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland then releases
its hormones to the adrenal cortex, which instructs our bodies to make
extra cortisol to deal with the stress. Cortisol allows all the
cells in our body to flood with additional energy to
aid the fight or flight response. Cortisol is our main stress hormone and
it travels to all organs in the body. It’s very important that we are
well prepared for a stressful event. Cortisol binds to receptors in
our cells and that’s a good thing Because the receptors
then report back to the brain: “Thank you! We have enough
cortisol bound here now.” The stress response is then switched
off in the brain and we calm down again. At least when everything
is functioning correctly. Many people are nervous
at interviews, but normally, when the
situation is over, our stress hormone levels
should downregulate again. People with this particular
genotype are not so good at this. So for them, the stress
hormone stays higher for longer. The question Binder
asks is: Why is that? Why are some people not as
good at calming down than others? And this is where
genetics come into play. One of the genes responsible for our
stress regulation is the FKBP5 gene. It is activated during
stress and ensures that an important
enzyme is released. It has the same name as its
corresponding gene - fkbp5 The problems start when
too much of it is released Then the enzyme wedges its way between
the stress receptor and the cortisol, and thus blocks the stress
receptors’ message to the brain that there is
enough cortisol. The brain is misinformed - it keeps
firing and we can no longer calm down. We think that stress
causes too much of this fkbp5 to be released and that
people simply release too much of the stress hormone
after even the slightest stress. And we know that too
much of this stress hormone in the long term is bad for many
processes including in the brain, which also increases the
risk of psychiatric illnesses. The researchers have
identified the FKBP5 gene as one of several important causes
of our hormonal stress regulation. Variants in this gene
could be partly responsible for why we react with
more or less stress. The researchers are
now looking for a way to block activity directly
at the FKBP5 gene. And here at the institute, this
has been investigated in mice that have been given
this FKBP5 blocker whether they are
more resilient to stress and are better
able to cope with it to the extent that this can
be measured in a mouse. The next step is to develop
a drug specifically for people in whom this stress gene variant
can be detected in the blood, and who therefore presumably
have a higher risk of mental illness. The South
of France. Psychiatrist and neurologist Boris
Cyrulnik lives and works in Toulon. He’s considered a pioneer
of resilience research. The traumatic experiences
of his own childhood give him a personal
perspective. I had a somewhat
difficult childhood, which motivated me to go into research
because I wanted to understand how we can find our way
back into life after war, as I had lost almost my
entire family in Auschwitz. As a four-year-old, Boris was left on
his own, without a mother or father. Hidden by
foster families, he was eventually arrested
and narrowly escaped death. The officers said:
he should be killed. So I knew they wanted to
kill me and I was all alone. And I heard adults say: He
has no family, he is lost to life. When I was a child, I
thought: This can’t be true. I reject
this curse! At the age of 11, Cyrulnik already knew that he
wanted to become a psychiatrist. After the war, he
studied medicine in Paris. The memory of his loving parents
also helped him to forge his own path. I fought to study, even
though everyone told me: Don’t bother studying, you
won’t make it. Well, I made it. When the trained psychiatrist
came across the term resilience for the first time, he
found his life purpose. When I came across the
word resilience, I said to myself, this is a word that needs to
be developed scientifically, and we need to bring it into our
culture to make people understand that if we abandon injured
people, there will be no resilience. Due to his own painful experience,
one focus of Cyrulnik’s research is child
protection. He’s particularly interested in the
interaction between mother and child. We started our research into
early childhood in 1981 on the island Embiez, near Toulon, where we gathered
a team of international researchers. The question was: What makes
one child more resistant to crisis, while another is
very vulnerable to it? He sees one of the reasons for
this in the mothers of these children. If the mother is not doing well, her
relationship with her child suffers This is a vicious circle that
can begin during pregnancy. We have been able to
scientifically demonstrate that when a pregnant woman is stressed
the stress hormones enter the uterus and the baby swallows stress
hormones such as cortisol, which are harmful
to the baby’s brain This means that the baby is
born with cognitive changes that are not caused by the mother,
but by the mother’s unhappiness. The researchers identified
a particularly sensitive phase in the final weeks of pregnancy and
the first two years of a child’s life. New networks are constantly being
formed in the brain during this time. If nobody does anything,
it’s a neurological catastrophe. The brain
atrophies. But we can intervene, we can intervene
gently very early and easily. And the earlier we intervene,
the easier it is to trigger the resilience
process. But if the child is left very
isolated for a long time, the resilience process
will be difficult to initiate. Elisabeth Binder is also studying this
particularly vulnerable phase of life at the Max Planck
Institute in Munich. The biggest correlation
is an almost 40-fold risk of having attempted suicide
when someone experiences severe traumatic
experiences as a child. Even during pregnancy,
too much stress or trauma can lead the embryo’s
natural barrier against the mother’s stress
hormones to break. Why is chronic stress
harmful to the brain? Because chronic stress leads to
our neural circuits becoming weaker. Binder suspects the stress
hormone cortisol causes this. But to prove it, she
would have to be able to examine the brain of
an embryo under stress. It’s difficult of course to
get to the developing brain and to expose it to certain factors
and investigate how it reacts. Because this obviously
is not an option, the researchers are using
a novel method to recreate a developing brain
outside the womb. A brain-like cell structure
is grown from stem cells. The researchers call this
simulation a brain organoid. We can only properly model
very early brain development. We can’t model all
cell types in the brain and we can’t model how different
brain areas talk to each other. So it’s a very simple
and limited model, but it’s the first time
we’ve been able to do this. How old are these
organoids now? These ones are
about 40 days old. 40 days old. So that
means we could begin. Yes, this would be
a good time to start. Once the simulated embryonic
brain - the brain organoid has reached a certain
stage of maturation, Binder and her team add
synthetically produced cortisol. The effects of the hormone
on the development of the brain cells
are then investigated. And then we see that this
stress hormone actually alters the development
and, in particular, the gene expression of
genes that have also been associated with the risk
of psychiatric illnesses. There’s no doubt about
it: Even in the womb, the mother’s stress influences how
strongly genes manifest themselves in the child and can therefore have a
lasting effect on their mental health. A finding that could
have real life implications. It’s also important to screen for
psychiatric symptoms during pregnancy. Some clinics already
screen for depression and treat the
mother in good time. There are now many
studies experimenting with using therapy during
pregnancy to possibly mitigate risk. Environmental influences therefore
have a direct impact on our genes. Scientist and psychiatrist
Katharina Domschke in Freiburg is investigating exactly
what this looks like. We think that environmental
influences can trigger illnesses. So now the question is, how does
the environment affect our genes? Domschke is Head of Psychiatry at the
University of Freiburg Medical Center. In her laboratory, she
investigates epigenetic processes how and why changes
occur in our genes. Let’s imagine we have a
certain genetic predisposition and there is a particular
adverse environmental event. But how does this environmental
event cause our genes to express, or trigger, so to speak,
and ultimately lead to illness. This is where
epigenetics play a role. In order to understand this
communication between environment and genes in more detail,
Domschke and her team are looking at another stress gene the MAOA gene. It provides
instructions to make an enzyme also called maoa. This enzyme migrates
into our nerve cells and attaches itself
to the synaptic clefts, the area between
the nerve cells. This is where our happiness hormones
- serotonin and norepinephrine are normally transported from
cell membrane to cell membrane. However, if too much of the
maoa enzyme attaches itself to the synaptic cleft, it turns out to be a
real happiness eater: it simply degrades away the
serotonin and norepinephrine. one of the main suspects in
the development of mental illness is monoamine oxidase
A, or MAO-A for short. This is because MAO-A breaks
down norepinephrine and serotonin. But in some of us, this
happiness-eating Maoa enzyme is more active
than in others. Why is that Domschke takes blood samples
to monitor the MAOA gene and see how much
methylation has occured. Methylation is a chemical process where a methane
derivative binds itself to specific sites on our
DNA, deactivating them. This can be imagined as a
kind of cap that sits on our genes, putting them
to sleep. If the cap sits on the gene,
it is considered methylated, and the gene is dormant,
silencing its activity. If the cap is removed,
however, it becomes active again. In the case of the MAOA gene,
more happiness eaters are produced. The MAO-A enzyme is more active
and breaks down more serotonin and norepinephrine. There’s less of those hormones
available in the synaptic cleft between the nerve cells and
it may be easier for depression and anxiety
to develop. This means that we
are in a state of risk. If these caps are
on our stress genes, they protect us from producing
too many happiness eaters. This can make us
happier and more resilient. But that doesn’t always
happen for everyone. What we saw was
that negative life events were more likely to lead to the
MAO-A being less methylated, i.e. having fewer caps on the
gene, and possibly being at risk, while positive life
events were more likely to be associated with
increased methylation. So that means the caps were
more likely to be on the MAO-A gene, possibly indicating
resilience. Positive environmental
influences and experiences can affect
how our genes are expressed. Domschke’s
next question is can this also be demonstrated
in successful use of therapy? We’ve known for a long time
that psychotherapy works. Psychotherapy is one of
the most effective treatments anxiety disorders. What we don’t yet know
is how it works in detail And based on our
research findings, one possible mechanism could
be working at the cell nucleus level Can we put these caps
back on the stress genes with the help of
psychotherapy? Domschke examines the blood of
patients who are afraid of heights she climbs the tower
of the Freiburg Cathedral with them every
day for two weeks. The patients did what we
call exposure exercises, where they exposed
themselves to their fear of heights So they went up the tower, had
to look down and after the therapy we took blood
samples again. And what we saw was that in
patients with a successful response to psychotherapy, MAOA
methylation had returned to the level of the
healthy control subjects. Domschke also obtained the same
result in a study on psychotherapy. The number of test
subjects is still too small to make a definitive statement,
but the initial results are promising. So there are stress gene variants
that we bring into the world with us, and yet we can have a major
influence on our resilience if we manage to shape our
environment consciously and well. At first, I was paralyzed,
I couldn’t do anything. The will to keep going was gone,
you’re no longer capable of anything. That was at
the beginning. And then
things got better. Music was like a
prayer, a meditation, a connection that
helped me tremendously. A lot of people might ask, where is
God, but that didn’t happen to me. For me, music was my religion,
and my family and my friends. That was what saved
me during that time. Luca’s father, Georg Ballmann,
often considers going to therapy. The fact that his son had to
die, the senselessness of it, almost brings
him to despair. When you think about the trivial
reason that led to this terrible end, you just don’t
understand It’s so
meaningless. Georg Ballmann wants to do
something about that meaninglessness. And that’s why we very quickly had
the idea of setting up a foundation to turn this meaninglessness
into something meaningful. Together with Freddy’s
parents, Ballmann established the “faustlos” foundation, a
program that starts in kindergarten to prevent violence
as early as possible. It allows him to stay active, and
keep the memory of his son alive. At the Mainz resilience center,
psychologist Michèle Wessa focuses her research on very practical
help for people in crisis situations. She says that resilient behavior
can only develop very gradually. It doesn’t work to develop training
courses that somehow make people more resilient and more efficient within an hour and
a half or even a day, which is perhaps what
some people would like to see. That won’t work and
that’s not what we aim to do. For Wessa, resilience
is regulated by the self. She tells us her favorite story
to help explain what she means. The story of the elephant
in chains by Jorge Bucay is about a very small
elephant, a newborn, being chained to a small
wooden peg in a circus. The baby elephant keeps
trying to break free from the chain, but to no avail. But it eventually grew
bigger and stronger, in fact, it could have
broken free long ago. It lacks the belief
that it can do it, and that alone causes it to stand
still and not try to free itself. When we have the feeling
that we can do nothing, that we are powerless
and at the mercy of others, this is known in psychology
as “learned helplessness”. Wessa examines this state in
detail in various experiments. In the experiment, the test subjects
are first given an unpleasant noise and at the same time a somewhat
unpleasant stimulus on their skin. They are shown circles,
triangles and squares, on which they have to
press a different button. If the participants
press the right button, they can stop the
unpleasant noises. This applies
to one group. In a second
group, however, pressing the right button
sometimes causes the noises to stop, but sometimes
it doesn’t. What one group learns
is, I press a correct button, so I have the situation under
control, the stimulus is over. The other group learns
that no matter what I do, chance determines
what happens. If this happens
several times in a row, it leads to an experience
of helplessness there is nothing
we can do. We might recognize
this from our working life: I do a certain task and I
always do it the same way. One day the boss
is very happy, the next day he throws it
back at me and says it’s terrible. In other words, I have the feeling
that I have no control over it. And that’s a very important aspect
of how stressed I actually feel. How does the experience of
losing control affect future behavior? In a follow-up experiment,
the two groups can only stop the unpleasant noise by
finding the safe green squares on a field as
quickly as possible. Do the two groups behave differently
when searching for these squares? The result is that people who
have already felt they were in control in the previous experiment find
these safe green places much faster than the group that
experienced a loss of control. This experience that I have never
been able to do this before also leads to passivity and something
like the story with the elephant: That I just give up,
I submit to my fate. And so I move further
and further into this cycle of helplessness
and passivity. According to Wessa, when we manage
to free ourselves from this cycle, we can effect
change in our lives. But what about the situations
in life that we cannot change? I may not be able to change the actual
situation that triggered the stress, but I can always change something
about how I react to the stress. And I think it’s really
important that I learn for myself that although I don’t always
have control over the stressor, I do have some control
over my reaction to it. Wessa puts her research
findings into practice at a school in Bad
Dürckheim, Germany She is conducting a WHO-sponsored
resilience training program in a 7th
grade class. Mental stress has increased
significantly in recent years, particularly among
children and young adults, largely due to the
Covid pandemic. For me it’s important that we give
them strategies at an early stage that they can use themselves
to protect their mental health. She works with the students
on how they can free themselves from a stressful spiral of
negative thoughts and feelings. First, she asks the
question: What happens when we are convinced
that we will fail at something? Your thoughts
influence your actions. If you think you can’t do it, then it may well be
that you really can’t do it. So you would then say yes, I can’t
do it anyway, so I won’t even try. If negative thoughts
lead to bad results, shouldn’t the reverse
also be possible? That’s precisely where we can do
something for our health and resilience, namely by looking more closely at
things that we have already achieved. We often pay much more attention
to the things we haven’t achieved. And we remember
things that went wrong. And we somehow forget even
the little things that have gone well. She does a simple exercise for this
by asking the students to remember what they did particularly
well over the weekend even if it’s
something small. It was my grandma’s birthday last
weekend and I baked her a cake. I’m not actually that good at
baking, but I managed to do it. She really liked it and
that made me happy. Great, and it made
your grandma happy too. I helped my dad tidy up
my room on the weekend. I never do that! I always throw everything
in drawers and that’s it. But this time I really
did it with some structure and it was much, much better than
just throwing everything in somewhere. Remembering the successes, trying not
to judge experiences too negatively, staying active despite adversity -
these are key factors for resilience. We’ve
learned a lot. I understand the term now, and know
more about the topic of resilience. We also learned how we
feel and that we can influence what is happening inside of us: our fears and how we
can fight against them. And yes, it was a
great experience. We can equip ourselves mentally
at an early age to cope better with crises later on, which we will
all experience in one form or another. But to what extent does being
resilient also mean social pressure to self-optimize to be ready to
perform at all times? Resilience simply means
finding ways to deal with stress. And that doesn’t mean that you
should try to cope with as much stress as possible, but that you should
perhaps recognize for yourself: Well, if I have ten appointments
a day, that’s too much. I’d rather try to have
fewer appointments, or I will plan time to
relax to compensate. And that increases
overall resilience to be able to cope better
with the various factors in life. In Toulon, resilience researcher
Boris Cyrulnik also sees government and society as having a
duty to create an environment that enables us to
remain mentally healthy. Resilience is genetic,
biological, emotional and political. Because it’s politicians who
are going to make the decisions to keep pregnant women safe, to
create jobs in early childhood care. These are all
political decisions. In 2019, the French government
launched a nationwide program based on
Cyrulnik’s work. I’m very happy to welcome you
here and to launch this mission for children’s first
thousand days. And I’d like to
thank Boris Cyrulnik, since this work is
based on his reflections. The first 1000 days is the name of the
government program. Under the
leadership of Cyrulnik, projects are financed
nationwide in maternity wards and kindergartens to better protect
children and soon-to-be parents. At the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich,
the Ballmann and Wilke families are awarded the Bavarian
Innovation Prize for Volunteering their “faustlos” foundation it’s a great honor. And they can fund new projects
with the 10,000 euros prize money. Working for the foundation
means a lot to Céline Wilke. It’s my way of dealing with the
days when I’m not feeling great, when my husband
isn’t feeling great. That we have
something to work on. Their lives can never
go back to how they were. The scars will
remain forever. But the families carry
on as best they can. A loss like that puts
a lot into perspective. I don’t think you get upset about
the small things so quickly anymore. You enjoy the moment more because you
know how quickly moments can change, how situations
can change. You move through life
with much more awareness. Resilience is not a state of being,
but rather a continuous process. Our psyche is a complex mix
of environmental influences, genes and our
own ability to act. Resilience is not
about happiness it’s about living with
all of life’s gray areas, surviving crises without
losing your mental health. To have a realistic
understanding. Everyone told me it’s
not even worth trying. I tried anyway, but that doesn’t
mean everything went like I wanted. Like everyone else, my resilience
is never perfect, never 100%. I managed to achieve a
lot in spite of everything, but I haven’t solved everything,
and I think that can be said of you, of me, of everyone.
