RFK, JR.’S ATTACKS ON ANTI-DEPRESSANTS

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has declared war on SSRIs, including Prozac and Zoloft, and other anti-depressants. Ignoring the critical issue of access to mental health services (approximately half of all Americans with mental health illness receive no care), he has decided that the major problem is the over-use of those medications.

This is not Kennedy’s first attack on anti-depressants. He previously stated that they are more difficult to quit than heroin and that the drugs cause mass shootings. During his presidential campaign, he suggested that people with depression, along with those who have been diagnosed with ADHD or misuse drugs, should be sent to “wellness farms,” where they would grow their own organic food “because a lot of behavioral issues are food related.”

“Some of [Kennedy’s] recommendations are completely reasonable,” states Vera Feuer, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Those include encouraging providers to inform patients about both the risks of antidepressants and how to safely taper off them. Mental health experts also acknowledge that little evidence-based research exists about the long-term effects of anti-depressants and the best way to discontinue their use.

Nevertheless, as Stephen B. Soumerai, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and Christine Y. Lu, a professor at the Sydney Pharmacy School at the University of Sydney, write, “Antidepressants aren’t perfect; no drug or treatment is. But as with vaccines, they are proven to save lives, to be of enormous value, and to have benefits that vastly outweigh any downsides.” Other mental health advocates and providers warn that Kennedy is simplifying an extremely complex problem.

Although numerous commentators point to the similarities between Kennedy’s fight against antidepressants and his campaign against vaccines, we hear little about the extent to which his disparagement of antidepressants also reflects widespread attitudes about depression. According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, psychiatric disorders “are among the most highly stigmatized health conditions in the United States, and they remain barriers to full participation in society in areas as basic as education, housing, and employment.” People with depression may be especially reviled. “The fact is that most people are appalled by depression,” observes Andrew Solomon in his bestselling and award-winning book, The Noonday Demon. “Though some respond to a display of depression with increased sympathy and altruism, more respond with revulsion and disgust.”

The high premium placed on happiness in the United States helps to explain why depression generates such negative emotions. “The Declaration of Independence” asserts that we are entitled not only to “life and liberty” but also to “the pursuit of happiness.” If happiness eludes us, we have an obligation to strive for it. The positive psychology movement purports to explain how we can do so. The founder was Martin Seligman, the psychologist credited with developing the theory of learned helplessness. The author of Authentic Happiness as well as a host of other academic and self-help books, Seligman directs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The center offers courses and training programs and sponsors research on such topics as grit, resilience, positive health, and the science of imagination.

The movement has rapidly spread to other colleges and universities. In 2018, Yale introduced a course titled “Psychology and the Good Life,” which sought to make not only individual students but also the entire campus happier. With 1,200 students (nearly a fourth of the undergraduate student body), it was Yale’s most popular class ever. Outside academia, articles in mass circulation magazines, TED talks, and such television programs as the Oprah Winfrey Show introduce the basic tenets of positive psychology to a large swath of the population. As the historian Daniel Horowitz writes, “It is hard to think of an academic specialty at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first that so fully entered the popular realm and so greatly affected the lives of millions of people worldwide—one that, in effect, became a cultural movement.”

The anthropologist Emily Martin demonstrates that we view the manic phase of bipolar disorder in a far more positive light than the depressive. Mania is characterized by volubility, restlessness, risk-taking, unbounded energy, self-confidence, and enthusiasm. Because those qualities can enhance productivity and creativity, they are considered essential for success in the entertainment and business worlds.

Manic qualities are deemed especially desirable when they manifest as hypomania, a mild version of mania not linked to mental illness. John D. Gartner, a psychologist and author, celebrates the hypomanic traits of men (and only men) from each century who helped to make the country great--Christopher Columbus, John Winthrop, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Carnegie, and Craig Venter. “Their irrational confidence, ambitious vision, and unstoppable zeal,” he claims, were necessary to change “the course of our history.”

Kay Jamison, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, cites John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt to illustrate the benefits of what she calls “exuberance”: “Infectiously enthusiastic, stupendously energetic, they left the country a wilder and more beautiful place because of their vision and action.” By contrast, she describes depression as “the draining out of vital forces.”

Depression also is associated with weakness, a characteristic the Trump administration deplores. Even family members who devote themselves to caring for a person with depression occasionally wonder if the real problem is a lack of inner strength. The writer Nell Casey lovingly tended her sister during her serious bouts of serious depression. “And still,” Nell later confessed, “there are always private suspicions in the presence of the depressed: Is this person just spiritually weaker? And I stronger? Couldn’t it be worse? You have life! You have health!” Watching her sister “shuffle down hospital corridors—dirty sweatsocks, toes knocking into the backs of her ankles as she saunters up and down to nowhere,” Nell wants to shout, “Oh, for chrissakes, pick up your feet!”

Glorifying strength, power, and even brutality, the current administration can have no sympathy or compassion for people with depression. Trump often justifies his actions by saying he doesn’t “want to look weak”; he routinely calls anyone he dislikes “weak” as well as “stupid.” Announcing his plan to test the testosterone levels of men over 30, Pete Hesgeth explains that he wants his troops to be “strong, resilient and capable” to keep them at “the leading edge of lethality.” RFK, Jr. regularly posts pictures of his muscles as well as the strength training routine that has produced them. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that he views depression as a personal failing, needing only lifestyle changes, rather than a serious mental health condition requiring professional help, including, in some instances, medication.

Theresa Miskimen Rivera, president of the American Psychiatric Association, states that Kennedy “really ignores the larger reality, which is that too many patients really cannot access timely, comprehensive care that is needed for our nation.” Barriers to care include not only cost and the lack of providers but also the stigma surrounding depression. If Kennedy’s rhetoric and recent actions intensify that stigma, he will deter many more people from seeking essential help.

Sources:

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, “Overview,” Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change (2016), www.nap.edu/catalog/23442/.

Andrew Solomon, Noonday Demon (Scribner, 2001).

Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Nell Casey,” Wish You Were Here,” in Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, ed. Nell Casey (New York: Harper, 2001).

Positive Psychology Center, “Our Mission,” https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/our-mission.

David Shimer, “Yale’s Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness,” New York Times (January 26, 2018).

Daniel Horowitz, Happier: The History of a Cultural Movement that Aspired to Transform America (Oxford University Press, 2018) 5.

Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2009)

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (Henry Holt, 2009).

John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link between Craziness and Success in America (Simon and Schuster, 2005).

Curtis E. Hartmann, “Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression,” https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.53.1.106.

Rhitu Chatterjee, “Psychiatrists Say RFK Jr.’s Take on SSRIs Is an ‘Oversimplification’ of The Problem,” NPR May 7, 2026.

Stephen B. Soumerai and Christine Y. Lu, “RFK Jr.’s War on Antidepressants Is Coming—and It Will Cost Lives,” StatNews, January 7, 2026.

Chelsea Cirruzzo and Lizzy Lawrence, “HHS Presses Ahead with Effort to Curb Antidepressant Use,” StatNews, July 13, 2026.