Our epidemic of loneliness

N DEC. 15, 2014, I BEGAN MY TENURE AS THE 19TH SURGEON GENERAL of the U.S. I expected that my focus as the “nation’s doctor” would encompass issues like obesity, tobacco-related disease, mental health and vaccine-preventable illness. But as I embarked on a listening tour of the U.S., one topic kept coming up. It wasn’t a frontline complaint. It wasn’t even identified directly as a health ailment. It was loneliness, and it ran like a dark thread through many of the more obvious issues people brought to my attention, like addiction, violence, anxiety and depression. It wasn’t always easy to tease out cause and effect—in some cases, loneliness was driving health problems; in others, it was a consequence of the illness and hardships that people were experiencing—but clearly there was something about our disconnection from one another