U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy sat down with Spectrum News anchor and National Mental Health Correspondent Dr. Nicole Coss to discuss several mental health-related topics, including loneliness, the importance of social connection, and the youth mental health crisis. Dr. Murthy also opened up about his own mental health struggles and how he overcame them.

“Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling. Being socially disconnected, which can range from feeling alone to being isolated, is bad both for individual and societal health. Loneliness, unfortunately, has become this widespread crisis in our country where more than half of people in our country are struggling with loneliness,” Dr. Murthy explained.

“I struggled with, with loneliness as a kid, and many points during my adult life as well. But the truth is, I never talked about it. When I was a kid, I knew my parents loved me, I knew my sister loved me,” he said. “But despite that, I just felt this sense of shame that may prevented me from being open with them about what I was going through, you know, took me years to realize actually, that I wasn’t the only kid in elementary school who was struggling with being alone, who was scared to go to lunch, because I didn’t know if there would be somebody to sit next to in the cafeteria.” 

“Other thing, though, it’s important to understand is that this is one of the issue public health issues and often surprises people. They don’t think about loneliness as something that affects our health. But the truth is, it does. It turns out, when people struggle with being socially disconnected, it increases their risk of depression, anxiety and suicide. It also increases their risk of physical illness, like heart disease, dementia and premature death,” Dr. Murthy added. 

You also released an advisory about the youth mental health crisis. Can you break down for us that epidemic and why it’s so important to have social connection?

“Well, you know, I come at this first and foremost as a dad of a 5- and 7-year-old, and I look at the world my kids are growing up in, and I look at the extraordinarily high rates of depression, anxiety and suicide among young people. And I worry about my kids. I worry about all of our kids.

The reason I issued a surgeon general’s adviser on youth mental health is because I wanted people to know that this truly is a crisis. We overuse that word, but in this case, it’s actually appropriate. And we have got to turn it around because we are at risk of losing an entire generation of young people to mental illness. And it shouldn’t be that way. 

I can tell you about just so many heartbreaking conversations I’ve had with parents who have lost their children to suicide, the worst experience any parent can imagine. And this happened for many of them after their child was bullied and harassed on social media. But even despite trying to monitor the platforms as best as they could monitor their child’s phone, as best as they could, the end of the day, our kids were able to find ways around — you know those guardrails; they were able to hide apps and have secret accounts and parents are at a loss to figure out how to manage all of this, given how quickly it’s evolving. So we’ve got to have parents’ backs on this, and we have a moral obligation to correct that,” Dr. Murthy said.

Dr. Murthy has been tapped to co-chair a new commission on social connected launched by the World Health Organization to address loneliness as a pressing health threat and to promote social connection as a top priority.