Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Now Claims To Have ADHD, Continues To Have Insane Ideas About ADHD
He is, of course, self-diagnosed.
On Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stopped by to visit his pal Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about their shared insane ideas about mental wellness.
I was actually about to write about the fact that Kennedy told Rogan that he was going to make the FDA un-ban many of the peptides that have become popular among looksmaxxers — you know, the heterosexual guys who smash their faces with hammers in order to become more attractive while spending their days making up insane theories about women instead of actually speaking to them. That was until I started watching the podcast itself, which opened with Kennedy announcing that he has ADHD.
“I have ADHD,” he said, laughing. “I was at 11 siblings and I have seven kids. So I can work. I can focus no matter what. No matter what. It’s a skill. It’s a thing to learn.”
Please to recall that, not too long ago, Kennedy claimed that ADHD did not exist when he was a kid.
“ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism — all of these are injuries I never heard of when I was a kid, were not part of the nomenclature, they weren’t part of the dialogue. There was zero spent in this country treating chronic disease when my uncle was president, today it’s about 1.8 trillion dollars annually. It’s bankrupting our nation. Seventy-four percent of American kids cannot qualify for military service. How are we going to maintain our global leadership with such a sick population?” he pondered at a press conference last April.
Kennedy has also repeatedly claimed that the increase in ADHD diagnoses over the years is caused by “toxins” and vaccines and not, say, a better understanding of the condition/all of the people like Kennedy who self-diagnose, without any subsequent discussion with a medical professional, based on the fact that they were a little hyper as kids.
Admittedly, as someone who has been officially diagnosed with ADHD since the age of six, I find all of this fairly enraging. That someone can go around saying all of these completely batshit things about it and then have the gall to self-diagnose? I don’t even know where to begin.
But, as it turns out, this is not the first time that Kennedy has made this claim on a podcast.
Via MedPage:
In a May 2024 episode of “The Sage Steele Show,” Kennedy said he suspected he had ADHD as a child.
“For me, when I was a kid, I think I was born with ADHD, and back then they weren’t diagnosing it,” he said. “But I was bouncing off walls and I did so poorly in school.”
Kennedy told Steele that he knew he was a “problem student,” and his elementary school report cards were full of frustrations from teachers.
“I know why, it was because I was completely non compos mentis,” he said, referring to the Latin legal phrase for “not of sound mind.”
“I was thinking all the time, how do I get out of this classroom and get into the woods, turning over rocks, and catching snakes?” he said. “That’s the only thing that I wanted to do. ... And as soon as the bell would ring, I was off into the woods with my brothers.”
Kennedy, whose past addiction to heroin is widely known, said he believes he started taking the drug to self-medicate. “Back then, they didn’t give you Adderall and stuff. [Heroin] was my Adderall. I could sit, I could write, I could read, I could comprehend. And I was functional on it.”
He said when he started taking the opioid, he “went from the worst kid in my class to the first, second, or third academically in my class for the rest of my career, because it calmed me down. It made me so that I could sit still, which I could not sit still, my brain was in turmoil all the time. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t sit still and read.”
Heroin is literally the exact opposite of Adderall. Call me crazy, but I think someone who has demonized ADHD meds (and SSRIs) to the point of saying, out loud, on another podcast, that all Black children who are on them should be taken from their homes and “re-parented” should probably know the difference between these two drugs.
Just being “hyperactive” as a child is not the same thing as having ADHD. People have created in their minds this whole absurd mythology whereby normal kids who are a tad rambunctious or don’t like sitting in one place for eight hours a day are being diagnosed with ADHD and turned into zombies by giving them Adderall. Except, the thing is, when you give a normal person (or child) speed … they act like they are on speed. That would be why people who do not have ADHD take Adderall and other ADHD drugs for fun, the same way they might take cocaine.
I am not currently on stimulant medication for ADHD, because I don’t like the way it makes me feel or think. However, I do not feel like I am having a fabulous time when I am on Adderall, beyond the thrill of remembering why I opened the refrigerator door, organizing my makeup, sitting through a movie without doing a crossword puzzle or crocheting, or being able to just sit down and write without needing to do several other random things first. It’s not party time! I don’t know how I’d be on heroin, but from what I do know about it, I can’t see it having that same effect.
If you ask me, what we actually have an “epidemic” of is people who do not understand various conditions making up absolutely insane things about how those conditions are caused and diagnosed. Much like that guy who just wrote a whole article in The Atlantic about the hypothetical distress he would have felt as a young effeminate boy were he told that he was “really a girl.” That’s not a thing! Absolutely no one is rounding up all of the effeminate boys and tomboy girls and telling them that they are transgender. (Also, being neat doesn’t mean you have OCD — hoarders can have OCD — it just means that you are neat.)
Unsurprisingly, Kennedy’s self-diagnosis did not stop him from saying even more stupid things about ADHD and other conditions on the show.
“And we now know — this is so well documented — that there’s a gut-brain connection and that you know depression, ADHD. Chris Palmer up at Harvard is dramatically reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia simply by changing people’s diets. He’s using a keto diet. Um there are dramatically like what what kind of percent they’re losing 30 percent of their symptoms really. Uh um just from ketones from keto. What about have they done anything with the same thing is true? I mean you know there’s a big paper about to come out on losing a bipolar diagnosis, kids who lose bipolar diagnosis simply by changing their diet. We know that ADHD is driven by all these food dyes and stuff and that’s very well documented.”
The “we knows” are doing a whole lot of work here. “We” do not, in fact, know that ADHD is “driven” by food dyes. Research suggests that certain food dyes can cause symptoms similar to those seen in ADHD in some children, and that, in some children with ADHD, those dyes have exacerbated their symptoms. It is not, however, caused by or “driven by” food dyes.
Christopher Palmer, for what it’s worth, has very much pushed back on Kennedy’s characterization of his research, noting that it was not a controlled experiment and was based only on two patients, one of whom went off her medication while still on the diet and ended up being hospitalized for two months. I was not able to find evidence of this forthcoming paper on children losing their bipolar diagnoses by changing their diet, but I can tell you that pediatric bipolar disorder is extremely rare as symptoms in prepubertal children can often be confused with other conditions (such as ADHD), and that people do not just “lose” a bipolar diagnosis unless they never actually had it to begin with. That is not a thing.
To say that food affects people’s mental health, mood, and behaviors because of a “gut-brain connection” is like saying that Ibuprofen relieves headaches because of a “gut-head” connection. Food — all food — is made up of chemicals, just as medications are. Many chemicals, when ingested, can affect one’s mood or behavior and can exacerbate symptoms of various conditions, both physical and mental. This isn’t new news.
It bears mentioning, again, that part of the reason Kennedy did this podcast was to talk about how he wants the FDA to un-ban 14 of the 19 peptides it recently determined were not safe to be compounded. We do not know nearly as much about peptides as we do about ADHD medications and SSRIs. In fact, we do not know nearly as much about them as we do about puberty blockers, which Rogan has spent a good deal of time raging against.
What are peptides? They’re amino acid chains — the building blocks of proteins. There are all kinds of different ones for all kinds of things — building muscle, getting tan more easily, losing weight (GLP-1s are a kind of peptide, as is insulin), focus, mental well-being — some of which actually do what they are supposed to and are safe and many of which do not and are not.
Kennedy’s issue with the FDA’s decision, he claims, is that he believes that the FDA didn’t approve them not because they are unsafe, but because there is no evidence that they are effective — which, he he claimed, is “illegal.”
“There were 19 peptides that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies during the Biden administration. They illegally move those to Category 2, which says do not formulate. It was illegal because they’re not supposed to do that unless there’s a safety signal. And they didn’t have a safety signal. They’re not allowed to look at efficacy. They’re not allowed to say, ‘Well, we don’t believe these are efficacious or whatever.’ They can only look at safety. They move those to Category 2 which means do not formulate.”
Except they absolutely can do that. While the FDA is not allowed to consider efficacy when it comes to supplements (a good thing to remember in and of itself), it does not consider peptides to be supplements. They are categorized as medications, which means that, yes, they do need to be proven to be effective.
However, they actually were moved to Category 2 due to “significant safety risks,” all of which are still listed on the FDA website.
It’s certainly curious that a man who is so dead convinced that vaccines, SSRIs, ADHD medications, and all of these other medications that have been proven for decades to be safe and effective for most people are actually horrifically dangerous is so very enamoured by things that have actually been deemed to be unsafe. How does that even work? Is it merely that he believes that online wellness influencers are better-qualified to make these determinations than are doctors? Probably! Is the rule simply “If doctors say it’s safe, it’s dangerous, and if a random person with no qualifications other than a YouTube account says it’s good, it’s good”?
I am not a psychologist, so I can’t tell you what kind of condition or neurodivergence this would qualify as, but I think we can safely rule out ADHD.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
>>>>>“I have ADHD,” he said, laughing. “I was at 11 siblings and I have seven kids. So I can work. I can focus no matter what. No matter what. It’s a skill. It’s a thing to learn.”<<<<<
I’ve heard people use this as a flex before. “I have ADHD” means “I’m great at multitasking.” Bullshit. Nobody’s good at multitasking. Multitasking just means doing a shitty job on multiple parallel tasks.
Obviously, he has an idiot for a patient! He should sue his physician.