How do we navigate the impact of a pandemic on our mental health and wellness? The health fears, social isolation and economic insecurity associated with the COVID-19 pandemic will likely lead to rising incidents of trauma in the United States and across the world. Just as we know that childhood trauma leads to poor health outcomes later in life, experts are concerned about the long-term effects on those who experience this event as a trauma. How significant is this risk, and what steps can we take to mitigate the impact? A panel of experts will outline how uncertainty and extended periods of stress affect the brain and how becoming more aware of your stress while learning how to manage your mental health can mitigate the impact of that trauma. They will also share resources and tools that help people get through a pandemic and discuss what is needed to support communities when it’s over, addressing the impacts of social isolation, including depression, suicidal ideation and substance abuse. NOTES This event is the third in The Commonwealth Club’s Thought Leadership series, Destination Health, which is focusing on the future of health, featuring in-depth conversations on the challenges driving physical, mental and social health
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Destination Health: Addressing Societal Trauma

The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's largest public affairs forum. The nonpartisan and nonprofit Club produces and distributes programs featuring diverse viewpoints from thought leaders on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast — the oldest in the U.S., since 1924 — is carried on hundreds of stations. Our website features audio and video of our programs. This podcast feed is usually updated multiple times each week.

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As usual with Week to Week, our panelists will discuss the latest political developments in an informed, civil (and fun) manner. 
See other upcoming Week to Week political roundtables, as well as audio and video of past Week to Week programs.

This program contains EXPLICIT content.
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Week to Week Political Roundtable: February 22, 2024

The Philippines has traditionally been seen as a gateway to Southeast Asia and a strong ally of the United States in the Pacific. The country’s natural beauty and endowment have attracted many to its shores but have brought opportunities and challenges to the nation as well.
Learn about its continued march toward economic development and as an archipelagic nation in a sea of warring interests, as we engage Philippine Consul General in San Francisco Neil Ferrer in a discussion.
MLF ORGANIZER: Kalidip Choudhury
 
An Asia-Pacific Affairs Member-led Forum program. Forums and chapters at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.
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Philippines–U.S. Relations: Evolving Opportunities and Challenges

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why?
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt says the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
Most important, Haidt offers a clear call to action. Join us as he describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.
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Jonathan Haidt with Tristan Harris: The Anxious Generation and the Epidemic of Childhood Mental Illness

How can young voters navigate a divided political landscape? Should we be afraid of this upcoming election cycle? Is our democracy falling apart? How can we save it?
The events of January 6, 2021, epitomized the destructive effects of extreme polarization in politics. As we move into our next election cycle, where the two leading presidential candidates are once again Joe Biden and Donald Trump, many young voters are facing—and fearing—existential questions about our democracy, in what experts say is the United States’s most divided political landscape ever.
“Are We Too Polarized to Govern?” presents accomplished Gen Z leaders who are working to foster bipartisan solutions to the toxic polarization that is causing so much anxiety for young people. The program will be led by UC Berkeley Political Science Professor Darren Zook and will feature Alia Braley, Cal Ph,D, candidate and author of the recent article, “Why Voters Who Support Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding”; Alexandra Leal Silva, associate at California Common Cause and host of the podcast “Democracy Is”; and Saanvi Arora, UC Berkeley student and director at the Youth Power Project. Panelists will discuss how and why we can exist and communicate in a diverse civil society and explore ways that young people can use their power to overcome political divides to strengthen and rebuild our democracy for the next generation.
This event is part of the Creating Citizens Speaker Series at UC Berkeley, a partnership between Commonwealth Club World Affairs, the Associated Students of the University of California Vote Coalition, and the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. The series gives UC Berkeley students and community members opportunities to listen to and ask questions of leading minds in politics, media and education as they learn how to become better, more involved citizens. We look forward to welcoming community members and students from around the Bay Area to participate in this riveting conversation and to join us for future programs in the Creating Citizens Speaker Series.
This program is part of The Commonwealth Club’s civics education initiative, Creating Citizens.
 
This program contains EXPLICIT content.
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Youth Talk: Are We Too Polarized to Govern? The Importance of Working Across Political Divides

Would you even have time to duck and cover?
There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war. And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States.
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.
In her new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made.
Join us as Jacobsen returns for a new Club program examining the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch.
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Destination Health: Addressing Societal Trauma

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