Demystifying Public Health - And Why It Matters For Mental Health

Back by popular demand! This engaging podcast explores our mental health from a public health perspective, and how, in a post-COVID world, we can avoid reaching polarizing ‘boiling points’ and reduce the experience of isolation and fragmentation across communities.  Host Leigh Morgan explores this topic in-depth with a an internationally recognized global leader and expert, Dr. Dani Fallin, who is Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Dr. Fallon defines what a population approach to mental health is, and how it helps us understand the how polarization starts and is amplified across society. She also shares specific strategies to build stronger, sustainable connections across dimensions of difference. 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the. Space in between podcast. I'm your host Lee Morgan. Again, this podcast is for listeners who are fed up. Up with the hyperpolarized nature of the world today. And who crave. Craves spaces where current events can be discussed in construct. enlightening and delightful ways. Let's get. Today's podcast is going to be really interesting. We will explore the increasing polarization in society today from a public health perspective and the factors that lead to siloed thinking and behaviors within our communities. Our aim is to gain fresh insight into the causes of division, And find practical pathways that help bridge device to help us do that. I'm honored to welcome Dr. Danny Fallon to the show. Dr. Fallon is the James W. Curran Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. The Rollins School is considered one of the world's leading public health institutions. Dr. Fallon is an internationally recognized leader in mental health and perhaps most relevant for our conversation today. She has deep expertise on the mental health challenges facing our nation and the world. Dr. Fallon, welcome to the Space In Between Podcast. Eilidh, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here and have this conversation with you. Glad that you are here. I shared a little bit about your work and as usual in The show notes, I'll post more, but what else do you want listeners to know about your work and why you are passionate about today's topic? Well, as you said in the intro, I think today we're going to talk about two interrelated things. One is what I call public mental health, and we can talk more about this. And the other is about isolation or, a drifting apart amongst us fellow humans. And I see these two things as deeply intertwined. And so I hope we get to talk about that today. And so I'm really passionate about not only the kind of academic Some might feel like wonky researchery perspective on mental health and a public health approach to mental health, but also the everyday experiences that we're all having where we're entering, into siloed spaces where we're only talking to echo chamber people who believe like us, so that when we are in conversations with people who think differently. We shut down. We don't have the skills. We aren't able to live in the discomfort of that kind of, dialogue and that's a shame and it's contributing to further isolation. And so, what has made me passionate about this is that we know that isolation leads to bad mental health. So they are really connected for me. Okay, that this is going to be such a rich conversation and you've been in the public health field for a while and I'll ask you in a minute to define what public health is but has this been a passion for you since childhood or when you started studying mental health? Yeah. So, I mean, I think like many of us, I had many passions as a kid. probably not high on the list was becoming a professor in public health. But to to answer your question, I honestly, very early on, wanted to do law, which may have to do with my interest in these interpersonal skills, but, you know, found by college and then graduate school a real recognition of the value of public health and that there are things that we could do for individual health that matter, like what a physician or a psychologist or others might do where you're really caring about your patient, but public health takes this whole population lens of what can we do That would change the structure that would allow for better health for many people at a time. And so I'm passionate about that concept of what we could do for one and then what we could do for many. And so I landed on the, what we could do for many. And in the context of mental health, So actually, I started doing Alzheimer's disease work and I had a grandmother who had Alzheimer's disease and I watched my mom as her caregiver and how difficult that was both for my grandmother and for my mom and other people who cared about her. And so really went down a road of thinking about Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative kinds of disorders, but that led to opening up. Understanding mental and behavioral illness largely. And as you mentioned, where I ended up then spending a lot of my career was on the other end of the life course, which is starting at the beginning of life, recognizing when there are developmental differences in kids and how that really affects an entire life course. And so that became my passion is sort of understanding neurodevelopmental challenges. And the co occurring mental illnesses that can exist with that. And then I had the privilege of chairing a department of mental health in a school of public health, where I got to see and advocate. For work across the whole spectrum of mental illness as well as mental health. And for your listeners, maybe just a little bit of clarity for what I mean when I say those words. So, you know, mental illness is the, this idea of a diagnosable condition. So anxiety, schizophrenia, depression the list can go on. Mental health is the sort of state of health or unhealth from the lens of of, mental or behavioral health. And so that could include mental illness, but it's also our experiences of psychological distress and how challenging those may or may not be for our everyday lives. So mental health is kind of a more encompassing term for me. When I say it, I also mean behavioral health. So not only those kinds of anxiety, depression kinds of things, but also substance use challenges. So I'll use those kinds of interchangeably. That's really helpful. And so to level set and clarify for listeners, what is public health again? And then have we seen increase in level of stress over the last 5 to 10 years because that leads us then to talk about polarization and how factors at a population level have contributed to keeping us apart. So a lot to cover in that answer. So correct me if I don't, if I don't get there, but the first just to redefine public health is really the concept of health of an entire group or population at a time. So, while individual health is clearly something of importance, I want to make sure that you're healthy, that your friend is healthy, that your family is healthy. When I think about population health, I'm thinking about what's the general tendency. What does that distribution of health look like across your whole community? And one of the reasons that I find that so important is we can and should be developing tools that help individuals. But public health also thinks about the tools that help kind of the central tendency or average or distribution of health for a whole community. So we think about individual things, but we also think about what are policies that you could put in place? What are infrastructures at the community level that you could put in place that would affect the entire population? A question about that. What would be one example that most listeners would say? Oh, Of course, that's a public health intervention or program that was generally successful. Yeah. So there's a whole list. I'll be brief with you about ones that I think to me are really obvious but may not be to others. Car seats, for example, many of us recognize the importance of car seats to keep our kids safe. And we don't question that now, right? But that was a public health success story that was really hard to come by when car seats were first mandated. Seatbelts is another example like that, that I think all of us experience and recognize now the value for the safety that we now have as a whole community rather than as individuals. In mental health, I mean, we all now know about pharmaceuticals that are helpful for anxiety or for depression. So that's sort of medical discovery that made those pharmaceutical discoveries. But where public health comes in is not only supporting those discoveries, but then how do you get access to those? They're only valuable if they're used in entire communities. So what are our insurance policies that makes those affordable? What are our screening policies that say, do we get screened for depression in certain areas so that we can recognize when we need that help? What are our stigmatizing challenges and how can we destigmatize seeking help for depression, anxiety, et cetera? Those are public health successes. Those are great examples. And so second part of my question was, what have you seen in terms of trends at a population level related to levels of stress here in the U. S.? Yeah, I think we're all experiencing and could endorse this feeling that our our stress, or you might use different terms like anxiety, are heightened. And I think of it in many ways, but one of them is if we think about just below the boiling temperature, you know, it doesn't take much of a perturbation for a pot to start boiling over, but if it starts from cold, it takes a lot longer for that to happen. And many of us are feeling like we're hanging out right below boiling point so that it's much easier to tip us over the edge. That concept has already been thought about quite a bit in the trauma informed care world or the trauma informed policing, or some would talk about trauma informed teaching, even this idea that if you're living at this kind of heightened anxiety or heightened stress, Things can get worse quickly. And so it takes a different strategy for maintaining coping skills and resilience when you're at that almost boiling point as a kind of routine, right? I think most people would say, yeah, I feel that or I noticed that in others and I relate to that. Yeah. And so I think we then need to think as a society. About how do we operate in the context of knowing that's true? So one thing is what can we do to reduce those levels, right? So that we're not right at the boiling point, but the other is how do we recognize and interact with each other and with ourselves knowing that we're at this heightened level of stress or anxiety, because that heightened level of stress. It's easy to see for me how when I'm feeling close to that bowling point, I'm going to have less empathy when I experienced someone else having stress or anxiety, or when someone shares a strong perspective with me that is at odds with the strong view that I might have. And so we can see how that might get extrapolated. And I was wondering about factors that lead to psychological distress at a population level. Uh, you spoke earlier about isolation, Or maybe there's more factors. That contribute to psychological distress at a population level? Yeah. So I think a good place to start thinking about this, that we all experienced was a pandemic. All right. And in the pandemic around the globe, and certainly here in the U S we experienced many things that increased our psychological distress. And most people would endorse that they felt some kind of psychological distress, whether it was sadness or anxiety or fear during that time. And two main sources of that were, I believe it, but I think it's also documented, were uncertainty. We know that uncertainty increases anxiety and is an uncomfortable feeling psychologically. And isolation. The kind of degradation of a sense of belonging. So when you put this uncertainty idea together with, a sense of not being included or not feeling like you belong to something that those are really challenging sources for psychological distress. And so, while the pandemic brings that into full display for all of us. Those points are true regardless. Those are always true. And so these would be factors that you and others who study this would say when they're lit up move a population and individuals closer to that boiling point. Indeed, and they're interrelated in many ways, right? And I think to your point a little bit ago about how, you know, once you're kind of at the bullying point, it's harder to show empathy, it's harder to give grace to the person you're talking with, It's the reverse to the less you feel a sense of belonging or a sense of inclusion, the harder it is to be resilient when you have increased anxiety or stress and, you know, and vice versa as you articulated so they really do go hand in hand and in fact just on the isolation point, the Surgeon General, what a year and a half ago, came out with loneliness as a public health crisis. So one aspect of this is that loneliness or isolation however you want to phrase that. And he put together, I thought, a really compelling document around the evidence for how loneliness affects all of your health. they had one cited, uh, article, uh, that showed that if you just look at mortality, like the probability of death isolation has about the same risk of death. as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, something like that. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Oh, and that's again, peer reviewed research. And that was I think a paper from 2017. This was before the pandemic. Wow. And so with the pandemic some of the guidance that we got was social distancing, literally, don't stand close to people when you're out in public, put on masks, which we know worked definitively to reduce the spread of COVID despite what some people might say, we know that masks worked, reduced disease burden of COVID, but it just strikes me as so ironic how the pandemic. And public health guidelines, which many people think were needed. They actually led to, isolation. It was a meta global time of isolation. Yeah. And I think we should remind ourselves that much of health and public health is a cost benefit trade off. Right. And so, The idea of those mitigation factors like social isolation, like distancing, masking, those were needed to prevent illness and death at the moment but did have some side effects, right? And so I think we have to keep that in mind. That's just, that kind of trade off is true in many of the health decisions that we make individually and also as a population. But to your point, yes, there was then this, you know, pretty prevalent experience of isolation. And I think one of the other things that happened, keeping uncertainty in mind as well, but in terms of this isolation concept, one of the things that happened is we only surrounded ourselves by people that we knew intimately, right? Or we surround ourselves in our virtual spaces with people that we could choose. We could choose to see whatever media we wanted to see or to participate in whatever Zoom groups we wanted to participate in. It was a very curated experience. And so one of the things that's led to that I'm really passionate about is this concept of siloing and how, we as humans in this society have become more and more siloed into surrounding ourselves with people who think like us, who act like us, you know, who, Live like us, whatever that may be, right? And you can see how the pandemic contributed to that because again, we had this For necessary reasons, this opportunity to curate our lives in a very specific way. And I hope we get to talk about it, but one of the things beyond siloing, so that's just who we surround ourselves with. The more, the scarier thing to me is then something that some people have termed othering. Yeah, this is the idea that not only do we live in our own silos, but since we're not experiencing other people's silos. We make up stories about them. We don't actually know what they're like because we're not spending much time with someone in a group. So we're making up stories that are actually pretty extreme and pretty negative. And so when we do encounter someone from those other groups, we're facing this kind of biased perspective of them from the time we start the engagement, whether it's a conversation or something else. And that's really troubling. If we go back to the idea that for help. There are, you know, benefits for human connection. And now we're restricting our opportunities for human connection because of this siloing and othering that to me is problematic. I think this is so important. And I struggle with this myself, which is partly why I started the podcast. Wanted to curate conversations that didn't feel to me or to listeners or to my guests as. In an eco chamber that we're telling each other what we want. And yet the irony is that you and I both have very strong views. So do all my listeners we're not saying don't have your strong views, but what you're describing is a human tendency to seek people who have similar views. And coming out of the pandemic, which was this meta curated isolation event, now we're post pandemic, we have stories that are out there that to many of us feel extreme. How do we think about reducing polarization disrupting isolation? disrupting seeking other people who just have our views. What strategies from a public health perspective would you recommend? I really like those who promote leaning into curiosity and to treating each other with dignity, regardless of our differences. And the leaning into curiosity really appeals to me because I believe no matter how much I disagree or have distaste for another person, there's something we can find that's common ground. There just is. And if I can't see that's because I haven't been curious enough. And if they can't see that in me, it's because they haven't been curious enough, either. Even if we're very far apart on our value systems around anything any political ideology, or health strategy, or whatever it might be, surely we can find something, like, we both like dogs, you know, or we both have a shared experience of losing a parent, or, who knows what it would be that's a human experience, right? That we can connect on and then build from there. And, that's not a new human strategy, but the idea that we desperately need this to promote public health is the new thing that this is really critical to all of our health, that we lean into curiosity for each other. And that we find ways to respect the dignity of each other, even when we deeply disagree. And that means learning things about self regulation that keeps you from getting to that boiling point when you're in a difficult conversation. So how do we stay in that conversation even when we want to shut down? And I have to admit, this is not trivial. This is very hard. You know, I may be in a conversation where the person that I'm talking with is bringing up things That basically negate my existence or some aspect of my existence, right? That is harmful. And so I'm not saying that we have to accept the harmful behavior and ideas of other people. What I am saying is that we have to live in that difficult space to find where there's some human connection so that we can start to build off that still acknowledge when there. When we disagree about those values, but at least we can start to try to understand where they come from, because if we don't do that. We're just gonna keep moving further apart. I love that you said that. And I want to share a really profound experience. I had right after the presidential election that gets at this space of being curious for me, and it was very profound. I listened to a podcast the day after the presidential election. It might have been one of the New York Times or NPR podcast it was the day after Trump had been declared the winner. The podcast started by sharing quotes from voters. I think four different quotes and it didn't say this person voted for Trump, this for Harris. It was just voices and what was so powerful is that the very first speaker was a man. And he said, finally, I feel respected. Yeah. And my first reaction was, wow, how sad that he didn't feel respected yesterday. That's that sense of belonging. He was missing. It was so powerful. And then I had my own reactions. But mostly I felt this deep sense of empathy and concern, not concern, like something's wrong with this man, but just how sad that he didn't feel seen or heard. Until somebody got elected, right? And then the next person who spoke felt utterly distraught and deep fear. Of like, Oh no, I'm in existential fear now. Trump has been elected. And so of course, Empathy there. We don't want people to feel that sense of fear because of who's in the presidency. We might want. To say, I'm concerned about policy but we don't want people to feel existential fear. Yeah, Lee, I love that because this is the point. Imagine if those two folks could actually engage with each other in a way that that man could hear her fear and empathize with that fear and where she could hear his lack of belonging and empathize with that lack of belonging. And that maybe that's a place to start building that, you know, we can agree and disagree on, as you said, theories and ideologies. But I don't think anybody wants someone to live in true fear, whether it's psychological or physical fear. I don't think anybody wants someone to live in isolation or without a feeling of inclusion or belonging. But it does take a huge act of grace and real self awareness and skill to get to that place, to be able to have the empathy that you felt For that man's perspective and for him to have had the empathy to feel for her perspective. Those are not trivial things. Those take practice. They take skill, they take ability to live in discomfort and you know, generally some grace. Grace. Oh, what a powerful, word. It's very evocative to me. And it can be hard sometimes to stay in a place of seeing someone who has views that are different and seeing them as fully human. And that is, at an individual level, so important. Can you speak about how that's important at a population level? Yeah, to me it comes back to this sorting idea of the siloing and the othering, because if we all about it, we as individuals know two are exactly the same we don't you know you and I, while we probably agree on many things. If we laid out a kind of, you know, full list of all of our beliefs across every domain ever, right, it's not going to be 100 percent match. There are going to be places where we disagree, even though on average, we might overlap quite a bit, right? And we have built this tendency to then just label the whole person, you know, you are like me or not like me, you are good or you are bad or some weird duality or dichotomy like that. When the reality is that's not true. We may have that sorting when it comes to a particular issue. You and I may be able to sort people of pro choice. Versus not, for example, right? But if we then separately sorted people by whether you're pro Medicaid or not, it might not be the same people in those silos because we as humans are not, monolithic. We each have very different sets of values and we wouldn't know that about each other unless we leaned in with curiosity and talk to each other about it and understood those things. And so. That's another aspect of this is figuring out how to think about the ideas of a person, but not demonize the person themselves. And that's hard. Are there examples of public health programs? And I'll ask you about two that come to my mind. One is post apartheid in South Africa when there was a truth and reconciliation process. We had apartheid, which was this horrible chapter of colonization and the whites in South Africa the majority of the population, which were, uh, black or people of color. And if you're in South Africa, there's lots of different words to describe the different subgroups. So I don't, I want folks to know that I'm using these terms pretty loosely intentionally. And also in Rwanda, after the genocide there When Kagame came in to power, uh, there was a truth and reconciliation process And we've seen examples also in the United States, in Maine, there's a wonderful documentary called Don land of, uh, the indigenous nation there in conversation with state officials. And I would encourage folks to, to listen to that and what happened and there was a lot of really uncomfortable moments and the outcome wasn't black and white good, but it was also very powerful. Usually these aren't labeled as public health initiatives but they strike me as similar to what you do in your work and what you've described today. Yeah, it's such a great analogy. And I think where you ended is exactly right. I doubt that people would characterize any of those activities as necessarily health or public health activities. And there are other strategies even now in our society folks who are trying to build dialogue. So there are many different Organizations that are promoting dialogue between different groups, whether sometimes it's based on religious background or based on racial background or based on rural and urban background. Like, so there is a lot going on in the U. S. right now that is mostly non profit, although probably there's also some government examples driven that is trying to do this work of Promoting curiosity, breaking down silos trying to build understanding and dignity across folks, but generally not labeled as a health initiative. And so I think you're onto something with thinking about how do you bring those together? So that it's seen as this is a way that we promote health. And I would argue it's certainly a way that we promote mental health. And that feels right to us because what we're talking about is kind of the psychological distress that comes from anxiety and from isolation. That's the theme we've been on, but I would argue that it's helped much more broadly. There's not an area of health that isn't connected to mental health. And so if you'll forgive a little tangent, if you think about dealing with a lifelong chronic condition like diabetes, in fact, Part of your ability to maintain your health schedule, your medication schedule, all those things is your mental health status. If you are depressed or if you are anxious, you're not doing that as well. And so folks have recognized this and actually have screening and implementation protocols for depression, for example, amongst diabetes care. In the HIV world, PrEP is this amazing prophylactic strategy. One of the main things that determines folks who do versus don't stay on PrEP is their mental health status. You know, so in every aspect of physical health, there's a mental health story to be told. And so when we're thinking about how do we elevate or promote the nation's mental health, we're really talking about elevating the nation's health broadly. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's worth just repeating that. We can repeat that all day because my own experience is the health of the United States right now is under a lot of stress and we see that in the extreme rhetoric that comes from many different perspectives and extreme rhetoric about other people. gets amplified on social media platforms, which make money the longer they keep people on their platforms. Cause if the model is they're basically ad agencies, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, and ads are most effective when people engage And the one really good way of keeping people engaged is to amplify by fear. Because when we feel fearful and uncertain, we seek people who comfort us, who we think understand our experience and get us and see us see our humanity. So it's a, in a way, it's a virtuous cycle with. really horrible consequences of, I believe, undermining our public health as a people. And you just gave an example of when our mental health at an individual or population level is under stress, we tend not to make good choices about how to care for ourselves and others. Indeed. There's so many thoughts I have from what you just said. I think if we can figure out a way to shift the narrative to a promotion of health in doing this, rather than a political agenda, you know, Engaging with each other is not about convincing you to think like me about a political issue. Engaging with each other is about building connections and decreasing isolation, which is helpful for our mental health and, as we just talked about, our physical health. And so I think we do need a reframe around why we do this. And then we need some skills building about how we do it, you know, and if I go back to the surgeon general's report on loneliness, I thought it was remarkable and also just surprising that some of the key tools in the toolkit that was provided with this. Are really things as simple as like flashcards that remind you how to engage with another person, you know, ask a follow up question. I mean, things that we would think would be social skills that we all have as humans walking around, but many of us don't and, or many of us have lost them. And so it really is about just rebuilding those skills about how do we engage with each other with curiosity. And while we're doing that, how do we maintain our own self to not get too upset, in the moment? And how do we continue to give grace and dignity to the person we're listening to? Even when the content of what they're saying is something we disagree with, person is still a person. That's so powerful. And I'm struck by earlier you mentioned the sense of self regulation, which I might re name as self awareness. So for me, when my body feels constricted or I notice myself not breathing as deeply, that's a time not to try to engage with someone who has a different perspective because I'm closer to that boiling point that you mentioned at the top of our conversation, right? I'm too close to it. So that a little bit of disagreement, I might actually be more tender or feel more prone to take offense at what someone might say. The other approach is creating settings where we try to lower the temperature and engage. And one of the guidelines to set is engaging and listening does not mean agreement. Right. Wow, what a powerful thing that is because when that guideline or norm can be set in a conversation, whether it's one on one or in your family or in your community or as a leader, then there's a sense of psychological safety and where there's safety, which you've mentioned, there's a higher likelihood to feel empathy and empathy leads to more connection leads to, I believe, actually getting better ideas about to solve our hard problems. I love everything that you just said. I think that's absolutely right. And you lead a large organization. The public health school at Emory is a a big deal. You lead this. Institution with amazing students and faculty and you engage in the not just the broader Atlanta region, but globally with many of your programs as a leader How do you foster a culture? where You can connect and ensure greater engagement because you want the best research. You want the best teaching models. You want programs that are very effective in the community. Yeah. what are some of the things that you've done to help foster a safe environment where people can engage, where diverse perspectives flourish. Yeah. So I'm going to approach this answer with some humility because I don't think that we have figured it out and had all the solutions, but I will tell you about things that we have been trying since I've been Dean, which is about two and a half years now that I'm this past fall. Did a a blanket training basically tried to cover all of our faculty and staff, which is hundreds of people in a 90 minutes to two hour, just short courage and conversation. Kind of work together and this was in, you know, several small group settings over time but where it was that was focused on helping folks to build skills about this self awareness that you talked about this idea that. I need to be aware of how I'm entering a space because yes, I cannot be an active listener. I cannot approach with dignity and grace if I'm at the boiling point. And so I need to be able to recognize those cues in myself. And I need to be able to think about what are my strategies for handling those you talked about breathing deeply, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of different strategies that people can use that are tailored to yourself, but that awareness and then that skill is step one before going to other skills about then how do you. How do you ask questions? How do you listen? How do you seek to be, seek to understand the person you're with rather than to be understood, you know, there's sort of higher level skills too, but it starts with that self awareness and management skill. So that was really wonderful to have our faculty and staff go through that. Our students do something a little bit different in their orientation and then through some of their professional development. Secondly we have been using a model called living room conversations. So this is a nonprofit based, uh, model that's deployed around the U S and probably other parts of the world that gives you a way to have about a 10 to 12 person conversation. dialogue with a facilitator where you do practice your skills of discussing deep and hard topics together. And you practice those skills of leaning in with curiosity, of active listening, of treating each other with dignity. And so we've been hosting those in both Uh, affinity type groups as well as mixed groups. And so you said earlier, when you're really close to that boiling point, you actually seek solace from people that you do know are like minded. That is still going to be a human strategy. Like no one is saying, take that away because there's so much value in that. So sometimes having these difficult ones are practicing these skills. are best done with people who are similar to you in whatever identity space we're talking about, right? At a school of public health, it may be whether you're a faculty or a student. It may also be whether you're a person of color or not. It, you know, there's all kinds of ways that, that you could think about what sameness versus differentness for doing these conversations. Yeah. I believe strongly. It's also important to do these in mixed groups. in whatever that domain is as well. Those are harder and the psychological safety to be built takes more work. But I think the payoff is really great. So that's another thing we're doing. And then a separate set of things, but related is around communication skills more generally. And so we are building a science communication certificate, but also have done communications trainings for our faculty, staff, and students. Some of that is media training. How do you talk to media and get messages across? But some of it is back to this idea of. How do you give grace in any messaging that you're giving? So one example I'll give about that relates to difficult conversations and health is vaccination. we as public health practitioners know the value of vaccination and we've seen how many lives are saved and how much disability is prevented because of vaccine use. But there are folks who are hesitant and one public health approach could be to just come in and say, you're an idiot. Don't you know the data you're so wrong for not wanting to get vaccinated and you know, you're bad. Me good. You bad. Super unhelpful. Right. I mean, a more appropriate approach is tell me more why are you worried about this vaccine? What, what in your experience has made you feel this way? Let's think through it together and there's nothing wrong with you as a human for being fearful of something that you don't understand or something that you fear could cause harm. So let's talk it through. Let's approach this from a place of curiosity, not indignity, right? I can treat you with dignity, even though I disagree with your decision making at the moment. So that's a both the kind of skills we've already been talking about, but also a science communication strategy. And so that's how these two relate in my mind. And so that's a lot of the work that we're also doing. And I'm guessing that the school, again, hundreds of people involved from faculty, tech staff, administration, your community partners, near and far, very diverse. I'm certain multiple languages, people from all around the world that are part of this organization you run and my own experience is that the more diverse the groups, the harder it is to create those spaces and yet when spaces where there is psychological safety, innovation thrives. With diverse perspectives. Yeah, absolutely. I've just seen that over and over again, right? That the best ideas come when you get diverse perspectives and in order to Places where people feel seen and heard. You have to work at it. You have to actually say, we need this to be a place where people feel safe and you can't do it all the time, but just having that aspiration and intention. That's the first step. So I commend you and your colleagues for being very intentional about creating those spaces and building skills to contradict the meta polarization that we find in the world. Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. And you can see it when you start doing this work in health and probably in other spaces too as your experience has shown or have you lived through. It really does happen in all things, right? The innovation that you get with new scientific ideas, the innovation you get with new ways to implement something that you hadn't thought of because someone who has. Seen things through a very different lens for a long time. It seems much more obvious to them, right? If you couldn't get to a place where they felt comfortable enough to say that out loud and not feel that they would be judged or, you know, dismissed or whatever those things are, The richer the outcome of whatever that goal is in that meeting in that group in that project, you're just absolutely right. But it does take building this. So in addition to the stuff that we talked about earlier, which is like desiloing the public mental health advantages of connecting with other humans. There are also these implementation in science and health advantages. And it's so fun too. I see it all the time. Once that happens and you see how this richness of ideas creates this. Special things. You don't ever want that to go away. Right? And so that's another thing that makes me sad at the moment that we're in, because like you said, we do all feel more stressed than maybe we have been in the past. We feel less seen and heard in some sense. You know, tho those seem to be common reflections people have made and it, we know the the joy and the productivity that can come from moving in the other direction. That joy and productivity, we want more of those air signals and characteristics of communities that thrive and I would wager that amidst a lot of the polarization that we hear about, I actually believe there's way more connection. There's people from every community and I mean every community who are creating connections who care about their neighbors, their families, care about the climate. I think what we're finding is those stories of the connection amidst fragmentation. We don't hear those as much, but it's there and in this podcast, I'm trying to help elevate those places and spaces because there's a strong desire to support one another amidst the fragmentation, would you agree with that from a population perspective Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that not only is it just the proportion of stories about these positive connections versus stories about negative connections. It's also The quality of those stories. Often we're not doing a good job of storytelling, right? The narratives and the shaping and the making it interesting, even entertaining when we're telling these, positive connection narratives may not always be as. well polished as some of the negative storylines. So it's about frequency and quality. And so I love that you're doing this podcast because both of those things are being addressed and telling these positive stories in high quality and making sure that they, you know, rise up above the noise. Well, let's hope that's having an impact. I've told many of my friends, even if one person is positively impacted my spirits are bolstered in part because I do have those moments where I feel really close to the bowling point. Yeah. And that's a normal human condition. As you've mentioned, it's also a normal human condition for populations that might feel existential threat. You know, after 9 11, which was such a shocking, uh, tragic experience, the whole country felt a sense of vulnerability that we'd never felt before. There are some who remember Pearl Harbor, of course, but that generations had largely moved on. And remember what sense of kinship and connection that we felt afterwards. I thought there were moments that George W. Bush really helped to bring the country together through his storytelling, which was we're going to get through this. We need to grieve. He also was very strong saying this is not a time to other firms globally or citizens here in the United States. I thought that was a very powerful message, at the time that was a great sense of coming together. And so my hope is that we have more moments like that in the days, months and years ahead. that leads to a really good last question for you, where do you see bright spots of mitigating the sense of isolation, sense of uncertainty that many people feel? So I do think it's in these organizations that I mentioned earlier that create opportunities for dialogue and for conversation. Between folks who may never have been exposed to each other before, or who are very different than whatever the topical issue is. And this is happening all over the world, but certainly all over the US. Again, across multiple domains. Sometimes it's race based domain. Sometimes it's religion. Sometimes it's, you know, urban, rural, there, there are all kinds of different ways, and some of them are focused on teenagers and doing this, as you're into emerging adulthood, others are focused on seniors at sort of borrowing the wisdom from the lived experience of a whole life. And then some of them are very general. And Every single example of organizations like that and the work they're doing just makes me so excited and happy because each one of them has multitudes of stories to tell about connections that have been made and about new understanding between individuals that can change their entire communities. That is just really exciting to me and gives me hope that once we do this, like I've seen very few examples. Where a human has experienced a program like that and didn't come away feeling better, feeling more connected. They may still disagree. In fact, often they still disagree. That was never the goal, as you said earlier. But the goal was to improve understanding and improve this sense of connectivity. And I get really excited about that. I can feel the energy and I want to thank you for your leadership and sharing your wisdom here today, and I'm just struck by how this notion of being curious, and the other. Thing that you lifted up was the importance of storytelling about what's going well. Yeah. I did a podcast with a really remarkable storyteller, may Fox. She shared how from a scientific perspective, telling your story and listening to others literally changes. the nature of your brain and your chemistry which lowers us from that boiling point. Yeah. That's important. Let's keep sharing those stories. I know you are in your work and with your team and the students and faculty and the convenings and training and efforts that you're making. I know that has ripple effects, throughout the world. Thank you for that. And for spending time today on the space in between podcast. It's been such a pleasure, Lee, and thank you for all that you're doing on this podcast and in other aspects of your life with this same goal in mind. It's really comforting to know that we're heading in the right direction. I think so. Thanks so much. I hope you. Enjoyed this episode of the space in between podcast. If. If you did, please hit the like button and leave a review. Wherever you listen to the show. And check out the space. Space in between.com website, where you can also leave me a message.