On May 4, something happened that might, just maybe, mark the start of a transformation in the way mental health is framed and treated in this country.
At the culmination of a daylong Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the ever-polarizing secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged to put the power of his agency, which has one of the largest budgets in the federal government, behind fundamental psychiatric reform.
When he took the podium as the event’s closing speaker, Kennedy couldn’t resist mocking the “orthodoxy” of Covid policy before he transitioned to challenging psychiatric convention. Nor could he restrain himself from a loose, at best, comparison of withdrawal from selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most commonly prescribed class of antidepressants, to going cold turkey off heroin, which he said he’d done around 100 times. S.S.R.I. withdrawal, he insisted, based on a family member’s experience, is frequently far rougher.
But about his commitment “to confronting overprescribing,” he was sharp. He acknowledged that “psychiatric medications have a role in care,” but added that “we will treat them as one option.” He declared that “too many patients begin treatment without a clear understanding of the risks,” that we must expand “nonpharmacologic treatments” and that psychotropic drugs should no longer be seen as “the default.”