Environmental lawyer and volunteer riverkeeper RFK Jr continues to make waves in his current job as head of the US Health and Human Services Agency. This time, he’s going after psychiatry.
MAHA Madness
The controversial master falcon keeper who claims to have driven around New York with a dead bear in his car, announced at the May 4th MAHA Institute summit on mental health and overmedicalization that he will be mounting a new campaign to curb psychiatric over prescribing.
“Today, we take clear and decisive action to confront our nation’s mental health crisis by addressing the overuse of psychiatric medications—especially among children,” explained the white-water rafting fitness enthusiast with a history of substance abuse disorder. “We will support patient autonomy, require informed consent and shared decision-making, and shift the standard of care toward prevention, transparency, and a more holistic approach to mental health.”
According to a press release from the HHS, health officials will hold a series of event intended to promote talk therapy, exercise, dietary changes and sleep interventions as an alternative to pharmaceuticals.
Experts Disagree
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) issued a statement in response to the announcement.
While they welcomed the attention being given to the need for better psychiatric care they cautioned that:
“while APA supports efforts to improve the quality, safety, and evidence base of mental health treatment, we strongly object to framing the nation’s mental health crisis as primarily a problem of ‘overmedicalization’ or ‘overprescribing.’ That characterization oversimplifies a complex crisis and ignores the larger reality: too many patients cannot access timely, comprehensive care, while care remains unevenly distributed across our health system. It also fails to account for persistent workforce shortages, limited psychiatric beds, inadequate visit time, barriers to psychotherapy and social supports, insufficient integration of psychiatric expertise into primary care through the Collaborative Care model, and the lack of a true continuum of care.”
Unsubstantiated Claims, Scientology Ties
Kennedy has a track record of making unsubstantiated claims regarding antidepressants, suggesting that the drugs have a role in mass shootings and “homicidal ideation”.
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The HHS secretary who has no formal education in pharmacy, but claims a wealth of informal expertise on drugs, has also asserted that SSRIs are “harder to quit than heroin” and a danger to fetal development. In 2025, he recounted to around 3,000 people at the Rx and Illicit Drug Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, how he battled heroin addiction with help from his religious faith and the twelve step programme.
Kennedy has previously revealed that he has received payments from and maintains a business relationship with law firm Wisner Baum, during questioning by Senator Elizabeth Warren at his HHS confirmation hearing. The firm, reportedly owned by high level scientologists, is best known for an ill advised lawsuit against Merck, the makers of the HPV vaccine Gardisil, that has helped to slash cervical cancer rates in countries with high vaccine uptake.
[Editor’s note]As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has moved from rhetoric to policy with his announced MAHA “Action Plan to Curb Psychiatric Overprescribing,” emphasizing psychiatric medications “especially among children” and supporting tapering or discontinuation when patients are not receiving clinical benefit. Kennedy has repeatedly claimed, without credible scientific support, that SSRIs such as Prozac and Zoloft may be linked to mass shootings or violent behavior.
FactCheck.org reported that experts say there is no direct evidence linking SSRIs to mass shootings, and that Kennedy falsely claimed SSRIs carry black-box warnings for homicidal ideation. The FDA’s 2004 black-box warning did not validate claims that SSRIs cause mass shootings or homicide. It addressed increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adolescents, based on FDA’s analysis of pediatric trials and recommendations from its Psychopharmacologic Drugs and Pediatric Drugs advisory committees. The FDA said the average suicidality risk was 4 percent on antidepressants versus 2 percent on placebo, and that no suicides occurred in those trials.
Wisner Baum claims its attorneys and clients testified at FDA antidepressant hearings and that the firm’s efforts contributed to antidepressant safety warnings. Wisner Baum says it has handled “over 4,500 cases” against makers of Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, Lexapro, and Cymbalta since 1990.
A version of this article was originally posted at Medical News Bulletin and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find Medical News Bulletin on X @MedNewsBulletin
