U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy: Efforts & Challenges in Promoting Public Health

I think it's as important for kids to learn about how to build and maintain healthy relationships in their life as it is, frankly, for them to learn how to read and write.

Love is our greatest source of power. It's our greatest source of healing ... There are few things more powerful than love and its ability to help us through difficult times and help mend the wounds, seen and unseen, that we all carry with us.

We look at how much time kids are using social media. On average, adolescents are using it for 3 and a half hours a day ... And what we're finding, though, is that for adolescents who use it 3 hours or more in a given day, their risk of anxiety or depression symptoms double.

Number one, I would seek to delay the use of social media past middle school at minimum ... To the best of your ability, see if there are other parents that you can partner with to do this.

If we're divided the way we were during COVID during the next pandemic... that's a huge national security issue for us. That's what keeps me up at night when I think about the next pandemic that may come.

If you've ever been in a situation where you or somebody you love has struggled with a mental health concern, what you need in that circumstance is help. You don't need to be filling out paperwork. You don't need to be waiting 3 months to actually get care. You don't need to show up and be told you only only have 2 more appointments. You need to know that help is there when you need it.

Loneliness is exceedingly common with 1 in 2 adults in America reporting measurable levels of loneliness ... The numbers among youth, actually, depending on the surveys you look at, are between 70 to 80% who say that there are struggling with loneliness.

All of real life isn't happening on social media. There's a whole world out there, which I think is real life, which is happening offline. And what's happening online, too often, is distorted.

We have to get to a place where we can talk about what I think of as the core pillars of a healthy life, which are sleep, our nutrition, our physical activity, our social relationships. These are all vital elements to living a healthy life.

We've learned a lot about how to do vaccines therapeutics ... But what I worry what we are still struggling with is how we build trust, how we communicate with the public, and how we stay together as a country in the face of adversity.

I think that we have become a pill for every problem society. We look for a quick fix of a medicine for every challenge that we may incur.

What has happened—and I think, frankly, for many older people, too—is their experience on social media has shredded their self-esteem, as they're constantly comparing themselves to other people.

We are now seeing with mental health issues, as one example, that if we only focus on expanding treatment and deepening our well of knowledge there, and we don't do anything to help people stay well, that we just can't keep up.

I think it's important that public health initiatives and medical advice is independent of the influence of industries that may seek to profit from what's being recommended or for medications that are being prescribed.

I think that's exactly what we need—interdisciplinary teams that can provide integrative care, recognizing that, in this day and age, there's not one person who has all the expertise to help figure out how to best manage our health challenges.

When we talk about mental health, people think... the sole goal here is to prevent diagnosable mental illness ... But we also need to recognize there is a whole other half of the spectrum where people may not have diagnosable mental illness but are not operating optimally in their lives...

One of things we don't we don't have right now in the country—and this is, I think, a bit of a health infrastructure challenge—is we don't have a quick efficient way to reach everyone in the country with a health message.

The bottom line is that a significant portion of our diet is comprised of highly processed foods in America—and that worries me. Also, the other piece of this that worries me are just how much refined sugars are being added to so much of our food.

I think, sometimes, we also forget that a lot of the medicines that we have come to take and just see as a normal part of our life, just like any other vaccine, there's some rate of rare side effects that will happen.

I don't think that pharma money should be influencing our public health decisions, which means that it shouldn't be funding our public health organizations that are making recommendations.

One of the greatest contributors to burnout for doctors and nurses is a lack of self-efficacy. It's seeing a patient who has a problem in front of you and feeling like you can't get them the help that they need.

We still see way too many kids who are using vaping devices early on.

I think an important principle for us in public health communication has to be that we're clear, that were transparent about what we know and what we don't know, and that we explain the why to people.

I do want to encourage everyone to recognize when it comes to human connection that it is small steps that can make a big difference.