Will RFK Jr. Take Away your SSRIs?
And RFK Jr.’s Bizarre Plan to Send Patients to ‘Wellness Farms’
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Last week, hours after RFK Jr. took the helm at the head of America’s top health agency, the president signed an executive order directing him to create a commission to investigate how to “Make Our Children Healthy Again.” In particular, the order says RFK Jr. should “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”
In the parlance of MAHA, SSRIs are a "threat" to the health of children - and all of us.
Over the past couple years, we’ve seen a rise in right wing conversations about SSRIs, the class of drugs widely used to treat depression, anxiety and a variety of other mood disorders in approximately 13% of adult Americans.
Kennedy’s history with wildly inaccurate claims about vaccines, combined with this executive order, is creating widespread anxiety among people who rely on psychiatric medications. Many see the order as a direct threat to their access to essential mental health treatment.
My inbox was blowing up yesterday with questions from friends and followers frantic that we are all about to be sent to wellness farms. People were also more seriously asking whether the newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary has the ability to ban SSRIs.
There are a couple of things to be aware of here. The most salient is that this executive order is just directing a report to be produced. What we are seeing is the middle of a plan, not the end of it. There is not an imminent threat that your SSRI will become inaccessible.
This action is part of a very common pattern we see from MAHA, which is to Christopher Columbus the scientific process, ie: to discover something that has already been discovered.
The safety of these drugs have obviously been studied extensively and there is tons of research, including long-term studies, that have found that the drugs are safe and non-addictive. Manufacturers are required to monitor adverse reactions to the drugs in children and teens, and the packages come with warnings for a reason. Taking a prescription should always be done under the advice of a medical professional because there are risks. These are risks the medical community is already aware of and that are taken seriously.
One of the core reasons that MAHA resonates with so many people is that we do have a very real problem with chronic disease in this country. We have a very real problem with mental health, including lack of access to affordable therapy. And antidepressant use did rise in young people, especially young women, during the pandemic. “The increase was prominent among young women and girls. The monthly rate increased about 130% faster among 12- to 17-year-old girls, and about 57% faster among young women between the ages of 18 and 25.” NPR.
However SSRI treatment is also something that many teenagers currently rely on to maintain their mental health.
As Dr. Jessica Knurick pointed out in her Substack, this is a deliberate strategy that this administration is using over and over again with very clear aims. They want to: (Italics added by me)
Erode trust in science (by claiming it’s corrupt, medically unfounded, etc)
Defund public science & fire experts
Privatize science, allowing billionaires and corporations to control the research agenda (and line their pockets)
This is a process we are seeing happen with mifepristone (a drug used in medical abortions) as well. Conservative plaintiff's sued to overturn the approval of Mifepristone in 2000 by the FDA for abortion protocol based on bunk science created by anti-choice zealots. That case went to the Supreme Court and was not decided because the court said the conservative activists hadn’t found the right plaintiffs.
We could see this administration and RFK Jr. go after SSRIs In the same way the right has targeted abortions in both the courts and public opinion.
A key step in the conservatives plan to demonize and then privatize something like medical care is to start from a place of fear. RFK is hostile to SSRIs in general. During his confirmation hearing he claimed that the drugs are harder to quit than heroin, a drug that he was previously addicted to. NPR debunked that claim:
"Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk," says Keith Humphreys, who studies addiction at Stanford University. "In my 35 years In the addiction field, I've met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids."
But the comparison has still been spit out into the ether and floated into the culture and repeated over and over by RFK-stans, of which there are many.
Let’s back up for a second and talk about the Executive Order. Even though the focus is currently on children, it seems clear, given his rhetoric, that RFK Jr. will eventually shift his concern about SSRIs to adults so we should be prepared for that.
But can the drugs be banned?
Trump and RFK Jr. cannot unilaterally ban SSRIs, but as President and Secretary of Health and Human Services respectively, they could potentially take actions that significantly impact the use and availability of these medications.
The good news is that any attempts to severely restrict or ban SSRIs will face significant opposition from the medical community, patient advocacy groups, and many lawmakers.
From the outside, it seems clear that the goal is obviously to create a new narrative about the health of these drugs, to undermine prior FDA approvals and to re-litigate the issue. We will see what RFK Jr. says in the report, but he’s also been clearly trying to move the Overton Window on all things health. As Mother Jones noted:
In a podcast appearance last July, Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.” He added, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.”
Click here to see the video.
The Republicans are obviously not funding spas for all of us to attend. They don’t even want to fund lunches for kids in school. This comment is classic Overton Window shifting stuff and it’s sending the message that taking prescriptions to help your mental health is bad, and organic food can solve it.
It’s important to note, RFK Jr.s comments on wellness farms are even more concerning the further you dig into them, he explains that this is about ‘reparenting’ black children, who he says have been made violent because of prescription drugs. As Jamelle Bouie said, “taking black kids away from their parents and putting them on farms seems really familiar to me! What could it be?”
We’ve been talking a lot in this space about how good the right is at influencing culture and public opinion. Mental health has always faced an uphill battle against stigmas. We have finally reached a point where it is easier to talk about it openly and honestly, a point where admitting you are taking an SSRI can sometimes feel as common as taking a drug to manage your diabetes. I worry that once the right unleashes their culture warriors en masse on SSRIs we are going to see these positive changes rolled back.
Right now this is just, as they say, a concept of a plan. Calling our reps about this right now won’t create much actionable change.
But we can do some work in the realm of public opinion. If you are someone who depends on SSRIs for your mental health, talk about them with friends and family members. Talk about it on social media if (and only if) you feel comfortable. Let’s make sure that everyone knows someone who depends on this kind of medication BEFORE the administration demonizes it further.
And if you have time, share a funny reel about RFK Jr.’s wellness farms, I lol’d at this:
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The irony is that reading his drivel about SSRIs made me feel like I needed to increase mine immediately.
Christopher Columbus-ing science was a great line 😂😂 so true