[News] US surgeon general Vivek Murthy: ‘Loneliness is like hunger, a signal we’re lacking something for survival’

Dr Vivek Murthy, who is currently serving as the 21st surgeon general of the United States, is the first person in this position to have taken his oath on the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture.

When he was first confirmed in 2014 under the Obama administration, he was, at 37, the youngest person to assume charge of the nation’s public health. He’s also the first person to have been confirmed twice, having been relieved of his post by Donald Trump, only to be sworn in by his successor. Today, he commands a uniformed service of more than 6,000 public health officers who work on issues as diverse as the opioid crisis, refugee resettlement, emergency preparedness and Ebola outbreaks.

There is much that sets Murthy apart from his predecessors, but one detail stands out: he’s a high-ranking government official who insists on the importance of care, compassion and deep listening. Love, he says, is the foundation of good policies and needs to inform the nation’s public health agenda.

At first blush, this message sounds almost utopian – but Murthy’s own idealism is fortified by evidence. As he recounts in his 2020 book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, it was in the course of talking to Americans across the country that he realized the extent to which people were suffering from sadness, withdrawal and isolation.

“Loneliness,” he wrote, “ran like a dark thread through many of the more obvious issues that people brought to my attention.”

As surgeon general, he has described loneliness as an epidemic on par with tobacco use and obesity, and is at the helm of a new World Health Organization commission to address the hazards of social isolation. Not only does it undermine physical and mental health, but, in his diagnosis, it underpins many of our more pernicious ills, including violence, addiction and extremism. The antidote, he says, is human connection

READ FULL ARTICLE