RFK Jr. Once Again Coming For Your SSRIs

And he knows about SSRIs, because of how he was a heroin addict.

May 06, 2026

Hey! Are you interested in taking mental health advice from a former heroin addict who goes around hacking off the penises of dead raccoons? Me neither, but it seems The New York Times is, if not fully willing to endorse, at least hesitant to push back on his nonsense ideas about SSRIs and other antidepressants.

On Monday, at an event for the Make America Healthy Again Institute, Kennedy announced his plan to curb the use of antidepressants, which he seems to believe are just handed out like candy by greedy doctors who don’t even bother to tell patients that they could simply “diet and exercise” their way out of clinical depression. The HHS also sent out a press release about the plans and a “Dear Colleague” letter to physicians, advising them to “to expand the use of nonpharmacologic treatments and to strengthen informed consent and shared decision making.” It specifically listed “psychotherapy, social connection, behavioral approaches, sleep-focused treatments, physical activity interventions, and dietary and nutrition-related strategies.”

Via The New York Times:

The changes — new trainings, reimbursement mechanisms [i.e. paying doctors to deprescribe clients — Ed.] and clinical guidelines — nudge clinicians to help patients getting off medications, and to consider nonpharmaceutical interventions, like therapy, nutrition and exercise.
“Psychiatric medications have a role in care, but we will no longer treat them as the default, we will treat them as one option, to be used when appropriate, with full transparency and with a clear path off when they are no longer needed,” Mr. Kennedy said at a Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit organized by the MAHA Institute.

These things are all well and good, but somewhat difficult to do when one cannot afford therapy or get out of bed.

There is a reason why SSRIs and similar medications are a first line treatment for depression and other mental health issues — because you have to pull an accident victim out of the middle of the road before you start administering first aid. If someone is clinically depressed, saying to them “Have you tried exercising, though?” is not even remotely helpful.

Kennedy claims he is an “expert” on this issue, because of how he was addicted to heroin for many years, a situation some might describe as “not remotely the same thing.” He might agree with you in part, but only because he believes SSRIs are more difficult to get off of than heroin. Except for how SSRIs are not addictive and can be safely titrated off of. Whereas heroin … not so much.

NYT:

During his confirmation hearings last year, Mr. Kennedy claimed, without evidence, that S.S.R.I.s were partly responsible for the rise in school shootings, and that they could be harder to quit than heroin. At Monday’s event, Mr. Kennedy repeated that claim.
“I happen to be an actual expert, because I was addicted to heroin for 14 years, and I never wanted to be,” he said. “I was constantly getting off it, and then came back on. I went through withdrawal probably 100 times,” he added. “You just have to steel yourself for 72 bad hours.”

That is not, to be clear, a good way to get off of SSRIs, and someone who is a doctor rather than a new age taxidermist would be able to tell you that. While there are situations in which a shorter term inpatient hospital detox can be used to get off of SNRI antidepressants, which can be more difficult to stop than SSRIs, a slow titration is the usual recommended method for both SNRIs and SSRIs.

You should not, to be clear, simply “steel yourself for 72 bad hours.”

But not only does he think he is an expert because he was on heroin, he thinks he is an expert because a family member took SSRIs:

He contrasted this experience with the ordeal of an unnamed family member who he said “was suicidal, literally every day” when she discontinued an S.S.R.I. after taking it for several years. “That’s heartbreaking to hear from a family member,” he said. “And I’ve heard that from hundreds, hundreds of people, the same story again and again.”

Hate to be obvious here, but could that not also be because they actually needed to be on antidepressants? This is not a question, however, posed by The New York Times. Rather they just put it in there, uncritically, and moved on.

At the daylong summit, speakers advocated a variety of steps to address the overprescription of psychiatric medications, such as phasing out school-based mental health screenings, requiring written informed consent before starting medications and featuring prominent, cigarette-style warnings on packaging.

I’m going to point out here that, while RFK Jr. has repeatedly asserted, without evidence, that he believes SSRIs cause mass shootings somehow, we actually have concrete evidence that “[b]etween 2017 and 2019, 180 U.S. schools that experienced shooting incidents had significantly lower rates of health-focused support staff such as nurses, psychologists and counselors — and a higher prevalence of security officers — than 11,063 similar schools that did not experience shootings.”

But who needs evidence when you just have a gut feeling?

The fact is, Kennedy’s read on SSRIs is a relatively common one among people who have never been on SSRIs or experienced serious depression. Being generous, I would say it’s common, in part, because people don’t like to think that their mind could betray them. It’s easier, I would imagine, to believe that the reason they do not deal with mental health issues is because they’re doing something “right” and that everyone who does need medication is too lazy to do that and instead wants to just take “happy pills” as a shortcut. Unfortunately, this stigma is why a lot of people who very much need treatment do not seek it.

I get it. I used to not want to take medication for ADHD, both because of the way stimulant medication made me feel and because I had convinced myself that if I were really good and tried really hard, I could overcome it without “cheating.” But it was fucking exhausting and no way to live. So I tried things and eventually found that Wellbutrin was actually worked best for me. It’s not “cheating” any more than being born with a brain with working dopamine receptors is “cheating.”

I understand that people are very concerned about overprescribing. It does happen, and I know people to whom it has happened. Unfortunately, there are doctors out there who are not great and there are also patients who misrepresent themselves and their symptoms. Doctors can’t be with us 24/7, which is why, when patients can afford it, they usually recommend a new medication be taken under the supervision of a therapist or psychiatrist. There are situations in which people get overprescribed or underprescribed, or even in which they simply have to try a lot of different medications and dosages before they find what works for them. Almost no form of medical treatment, psychiatric or otherwise, is a one-size-fits-all deal.

The real problem, frankly, is that it is very hard to fully trust a healthcare system with a profit motive. We are constantly inundated with ads for prescription drugs, we know doctors get perks from pharmaceutical companies for prescribing their drugs over others, we know insurance companies can require us to take a drug our doctors don’t think is right for us before we’re allowed to take one that is.

Additionally, especially for women, people of color and neurodivergent people, the difficulty isn’t in being “overprescribed,” it’s having doctors take our concerns seriously in the first place, which occasionally leads to being underprescribed. Also, practically all treatments — drugs, dosages, devices — for anything are based on what works best for white people and mostly white men, because that’s who gets studied in clinical trials. Unfortunately, we’re probably going to have to wait until the next administration for any improvement in this area, as this one decided that clinical trial diversity was “DEI” and terminated nearly $800 million in research grants designed to correct these disparities.

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SSRIs are not “happy pills.” They are not Soma from Brave New World. People who take them are not just “being lazy.” They are critical, lifesaving tools for those they work for, and there is no shame in taking them. We are only on this planet for a very short amount of time, and we should do everything within our power to make it a good time.

There are important, nuanced conversations to be had about this, but they are not conversations that should, in any capacity, involve Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or anyone else who has made it abundantly clear that they do not know what the fuck they are talking about.

[New York Times]

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