Why is next US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy worried?

'Are lonely, depressed people trying to escape into social media?
Or does too much social media make people lonely and depressed?'
Dr Vivek H Murthy, the next surgeon general of the United States, wonders whether social media is worsening one of the biggest problems in the world today -- loneliness.

He is Joe Biden's key advisor in America's fight against COVID-19.

The US President-elect has also tapped him as his next surgeon general, a post Dr Vivek H Murthy held under Barack Obama.

Dr Murthy is just 43 and already has an impressive set of achievements.

He is the first person of Indian descent to become US surgeon general, a post he took charge of in 2014 and stepped away from in 2017.

In 2008, he founded Doctors For America, a pan-American non-profit organisation that supports quality affordable health care.

A strong voice in the American medical system, he has been concerned about the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Another epidemic he was exposed to during his experience as a medical profession, and one that he has constantly talked and written about since, is the astounding level of loneliness he has encountered.

It provoked him into writing Together: Loneliness, Health & What Happens When We Find Connection, which he hopes will help readers fight this debilitating issue.

A must read excerpt from Together:

When I first joined Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, I thought they'd be great ways to stay connected to friends and engage in community conversations.

I remember the first days of finding long-lost classmates and friends on Facebook and feeling happy to see their faces in photos smiling back at me.

But while it was nice to be able to reach a wide group of friends online, I found that we weren't really having the meaningful dialogues I craved.

Instead, as I absorbed the thrilling adventures, impressive career promotions and stunning achievements reflected in my friends' posts, I felt inspired 25 per cent of the time and inadequate 100 per cent of the time.

As one friend put it, checking your social media feed is like comparing everyone's best days to your average days -- and you always come up short.

I noticed something else that disturbed me.

I originally began posting on social media to share experiences and reflections with friends. But soon I found myself preoccupied with how many people would like, comment and share my content.

I remember posting a reflection on 9/11 during one of the anniversaries and feeling the genuine emotion that I'd poured into the piece dissolving as I kept checking to see if people liked the post.

It turned an authentic act of expression into a hollow exercise.

Chasing validation like that made me feel bad about myself.

Finally, I decided to take a break -- no posting and no checking my feed. Social media participation had become a discouraging performance, and I was done with it.

I deleted the apps from my phone and logged out of my accounts on my computer.

After dealing with the initial few days of twitchiness as I instinctively tried to check my feed and wondered if I was missing something, I started to feel less distracted and less concerned about seeking digital validation from the outside world.

I can't emphasize enough how freeing this was.

After many months off, I reengaged on very limited terms.

I decided to only post if really moved to do so (like when Alice gave a moving, heartfelt talk in Louisville, Kentucky). And, perhaps more important, I decided not to check for comments, likes, and retweets.

I dramatically reduced the number of people I follow so my feed focuses more on posts that enrich my sense of connection and understanding of the world.

I'm still seeing if it is possible to achieve a balance where I can interact with social media on my terms. The jury is still out.

The jury is also still out on the overall psychological costs and benefits of society's increasing symbiosis with digital technology.

In January of 2019, researchers Drs Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski at the University of Oxford published surprising findings that digital screen time has a negative but overall very small effect on the well-being of adolescents' social behavior.

After crunching the data on more than 350,000 adolescents, they concluded that smoking marijuana and bullying do far more damage than use of digital technology.

Przybylski and his colleague Dr Netta Weinstein had previously shown that the amount of time spent in front of screens makes a difference in overall impact.

According to this 'Goldilocks hypothesis', the mental well-being of adolescents does not appear to be harmed if they're spending one to two hours per day in front of screens, but much more than that can be detrimental.

Interestingly, kids with zero screen time seemed worse off than those with moderate use, possibly because in a world where everyone around you is online, having no participation could lead to a sense of being left out and isolated.

In 2017, University of Pittsburgh professor Dr Brian Primack and his colleagues found further evidence that high levels of social media use can be harmful, in this case contributing to loneliness.

They studied 1,787 subjects between the ages of 19 and 32. One group of these young adults spent more than two hours a day on social media, the other just half an hour or less.

All were asked to use a scale to describe how much or how little the following statements applied to them:

✤ I feel left out

✤ I feel that people barely know me

✤ I feel isolated from others

✤ I feel that people are around me but not with me.

The Pittsburgh researchers found that the heavy social media users were twice as likely to feel lonely as those in the low-use group.

 These results echoed concerns raised in a similar study, which found that heavy social media users are more likely to be depressed.

All these findings raise the old chicken-and-egg question of which comes first.

Are lonely, depressed people trying to escape into social media? Or does too much social media make people lonely and depressed?

It could be the case that social media use is driving the outcomes of concern, but it will take more research to prove that.

And use of these platforms is so prevalent and begins at such a young age that establishing rigorous research controls is challenging.

Excerpted with permission from Together: Loneliness, Health & What Happens When We Find Connection by Dr Vivek Murthy, published by Profile Books and distributed by Hachette India.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com