Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
"Guys gotta go. Can't be here. You just gotta go."
That's a police officer moving a crowd of teenagers out of a public park in Florida in July. It's a sound that played out again and again this summer, in city after city, as a peculiar ritual took hold across the country: hundreds of teens, summoned by a single social media post, converging on a mall, a plaza, a park, even a parking lot, just to be together.
Police call them "teen takeovers." Reporters reach for words like “hordes” and “swarms” to describe kids who “scatter like roaches” when officers arrive. On that night in July, a few hundred kids gathered in Bradenton, on Florida's west coast. Nearly every weekend of the summer brought a gathering somewhere. By Labor Day weekend, two nights of crowds near Philadelphia City Hall had ended in confrontations with police, confrontations with each other, and, ultimately, several arrests.
It's easy to read these gatherings as a discipline problem. It's more difficult, and perhaps more honest, to read them as symptoms. Symptoms of what? A crisis of loneliness.
"We need to build societies that are sort of designed to foster interactions with each other," says Dr. Ellen Lee, a UC San Diego psychiatrist. "So people have places to connect, have ways for people to find shared identities, or develop a feeling of belongingness within a group. I think it is really important."
Dr. Lee's words come from part one of our Petrie Dish exploration of loneliness. The lonely body focused on the impact social isolation and loneliness can have on the body and the brain, and it's profound. It shows up as a higher risk of heart disease, depression, cognitive decline, dementia, and even premature death.
That's at the center of this episode of Petrie Dish. For part two of our series on loneliness, Bonnie Petrie sat down with Jillian Racoosin Kornmeier, executive director of the Foundation for Social Connection. Where Lee diagnoses the problem, Racoosin and her colleagues are trying to fix it: not with additional research in a lab, but in the design of schools, cities, and workplaces, and in public policy.
Racoosin walks us through what rebuilding social infrastructure actually looks like, from libraries and parks designed to welcome teens rather than police them, to fruit trees planted along a new pedestrian bridge in West Sacramento, to "chatty cafes" with conversation-starter cards on the tables for adults who've simply forgotten how to strike up a conversation with a stranger. She also talks about raising socially connected kids from the earliest ages, and about not leaving our oldest generation behind as their social circles shrink.
The Foundation for Social Connection hopes to “catalyze a movement” toward creating “a vibrant society where social connection is at the heart of how we live.” If you’d like more information about the foundation, start here.
This story is based on an interview with Jillian Racoosin Kornmeier, executive director of the Foundation for Social Connection, for Texas Public Radio's Petrie Dish. Reporting and hosting by Bonnie Petrie; produced by Jacob Rosati and Dan Katz; editing and sound design by Jacob Rosati.
