Is there a national crisis in parental mental health we didn’t know about? The Surgeon General’s Advisory

CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA

Source: Office of the Surgeon General
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In August 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory to draw immediate national attention to the mental health problems of parents.
 
Who Did This?
Vivek H. Murthy has served as the U.S. Surgeon General since 2021 when appointed by President Biden. He previously served in the same post 2013-2017 when appointed by President Obama. His medical training is in internal medicine. He has one research publication from 2004 when he was in training.
 
The Claim
This advisory (about 13 pages of text) asserted that mental health problems of parents in the U.S. are extreme, and worse, those are being passed down to their children. There is a long list of causes of mental stress that parents have always had to deal with, e.g., lack of sleep, finances, and worrying about children’s health. But now there are causes that previous generations did not have to consider—social media, influencers, the youth mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness—such that “success and fulfillment feel increasingly out of reach.”
Reversing this situation will take a combination of new government policies and programs plus culture change. He listed 34 action steps divided among government, employers, community organizations, and other groups.
 
Analysis
It is hard to reconcile Murthy’s assessment that parents are highly stressed with the fact that until the twentieth century parents have had to deal with far worse stress such as higher mortality for women during childbirth, higher death rates of children from diseases, unsafe working conditions, poverty, and uncertain food supply. Going even farther back in time they had to deal with basic survival issues, predators, frequent tribal warfare, and overall, much shorter life spans.
 
The only evidence Murthy cited that things are bad was that “41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming.” These data did not come from a research study. They came from a survey by Harris Polls.
 
Murthy never provided evidence, or even asserted, that parental mental health is worse now than in the past. The premise of an advisory is supposed to be that a new health problem has risen which requires national attention, but Murthy never made such a case.
 
His evidence that children are at high risk because of parental mental health problems was based almost entirely on the research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The ACE literature is, however, flawed, because it has been 100% cross-sectional and has nearly zero power to determine causal relations (debunked here).
 
Many of the 34 recommendations were simplistic platitudes that are not in dispute, such as sleep well, eat right, and “Connect with parents and caregivers in your life...” The quality of the report was low in terms of scientific rigor. It reads more like an undergraduate thesis than national policy guidance based on scientific consensus. No research was discussed in detail.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Murthy appears intent on being the Coddler in Chief of the nation’s mental health. A central premise was his unconventional claim that parents are vulnerable because they feel unappreciated by society. For example, “Many parents and caregivers feel undervalued for prioritizing parenting over employment...” Hence, many of his recommendations were for government, businesses, and communities to remunerate parents in various ways. This claim was contrary to most individuals’ experiences  because the value of being a parent has never been contingent on recognition from society. A truism of parenthood is that the love and special bond involved in raising children is the greatest joy in life.
This advisory follows a string of reports by Murthy with a similar theme that the U.S. population has reached an unprecedented stage of fragility, suffering from a wide range of new emotional and behavioral problems. His previous Surgeon General reports have included youth mental health, suicide prevention, youth violence, and loneliness. He seems to perceive the population as capable of being emotionally wounded by everyday stressors. This is consistent with a larger shift in the U.S. during the past decade driven by a portion of the population that implemented social emotional learning in K-12 schools, created campus cultures with safe spaces, protection from microaggressions, and fabricated moral panics over smartphones and eco-anxiety. This agenda reflects a biased intellectual framework about human nature and a utopian belief system that the role of government and society is to uplift humanity.
 
 
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