Edward (Ned) Hallowell, M.D. is Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health in Sudbury, MA. He will present the keynote address, “How Connected are You?” at this year’s SSATB Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX. Last month in San Antonio at the 2002 SSATB Annual Meeting, attendees were captivated by his keynote address, “How Connected are You?” A synopsis of Dr. Hallowell’s talk and his workshop presentation, “Managing A.D.D. in Our Schools” will be available on Memberanda Online in the coming weeks.

In an interview for Memberanda last year, Dr. Hallowell told us, “In my estimation, the key to health and happiness and growth of all kids is what I call connectedness and the power of the human moment. A human moment, in my lexicon, is any moment when love and/or meaning makes itself felt. The more human moments you experience, the stronger, healthier, happier and more effective you will be.” Indeed, Hallowell’s own experience as a young man in boarding school credits his teachers and a healthy school environment as enabling a sense of personal connectedness in him that unfortunately his family could not provide. In his 1999 book, Connect: 12 Vital Ties that Open Your Heart, Lengthen Your Life and Deepen Your Soul, which will be available in San Antonio, Hallowell’s goal is to convince the reader to make time for connectedness, and to demonstrate that “it is attainable, and once attained, enduring.”

Dr. Hallowell shares the results of a study he conducted at Phillips Exeter Academy, “On every measure of mental health and happiness that we used, as well as on every measure of achievement, the students who did the best were the connected students. Those who were in distress were disconnected. Specifically, the connected students were the least depressed, had the highest self-esteem, felt most comfortable with their families, were most positive about their education, used the least drugs or alcohol, felt the least stress, and had the highest grade point averages.” In addition, Dr. Hallowell cites a 1997 National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He tells us, “Like the Exeter study, this study set out to determine which were the most significant risk factors as well as protective factors in adolescents’ lives… The study found two conditions most protective… the first… was parent-family connectedness…the second…was connectedness at school. This was defined as the student’s feeling that people are treated fairly at school, that he is close to people at school, and that he feels part of his school…what mattered most was the adolescent’s perception [of connectedness]…all that mattered was that the student felt connected.”

The Brookings Institution has recently begun to report similar results of another national longitudinal study. See “Student Detachment and Connectedness to School: A Need for Reform,” for details.

Source: Connect: 12 Vital Ties that Open Your Heart, Lengthen Your Life and Deepen Your Soul, by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., New York, Pocket Books, 1999.

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