Steve Joordens

And then you get angry and they suddenly become less human to you because of what they've done to you.

And so, you know, the frustrating part of that for me is because that pattern is so clear.

Let's not talk about mental health.

This isn't really mental health.

This is this is the consequence of being socially excluded.

And that's something we can do something about.

Like if we talk about it that way, if teachers could perhaps start to understand the importance of social health, and I think they do at an intuitive level, but if we could make it more explicit and if they could learn to recognize, oh, that student is starting to get sick.

sort of broken away from our community in the classroom, what could we do quickly to kind of reintegrate, bring them back?

And sometimes very simple things, by the way, there's studies that show that if you just make sure everybody knows everybody's name in a class and that they use each other name.

When I talk to you, I call you David and you call me Steve.

And just that simple practice can build a whole lot more community in a classroom.

It reduces bullying.

It reduces a lot of the incivility we see in classrooms.

I think we need to start attending to the social connection, finding those people that are drifting and trying at least to bring them in before it gets to the point.

Yeah, and we're seeing this get worse.

The social health among youth especially, and there's a whole bunch of reasons for that.

They text message a lot rather than talking to each other in person, so they don't have that emotional connection as strongly as when you do talk in person.

So yes, I mean, there's something called the GenWell Initiative that's trying to make everybody aware of this.

It's a not-for-profit.

I'm their scientific advisory committee, and we just put out the first Canadian social health guidelines, kind of like the food guidelines and the exercise guidelines.