war on drugs
Kennedy has made—and continues to make—many false claims about SSRIs.
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Grapevine, Texas, on March 27, 2026. Credit: Getty | Leandro Lozada
In a brief appearance at a Make America Healthy Again Institute event Monday, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced new federal initiatives to curb prescribing of antidepressants, which he has long attacked with false and dangerous claims. Mental health experts have previously condemned his rhetoric and are already pushing back on his new efforts.
The MAHA event was focused on “overmedicalization,” with participants broadly alleging—without evidence—that too many Americans, particularly youths, are overprescribed antidepressants in the class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. This class includes common medications such as Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, and Lexapro, which are used to treat depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, among other conditions. Event participants focused on claims that the drugs are prescribed without informed consent, are harmful, and can be difficult to stop taking.
False claims
The topics closely echo Kennedy’s claims. Among his many dangerous, evidence-free statements, he has suggested that too many people, including children, are put on SSRIs and that they make people violent. He has even suggested that they are the cause of mass shootings, including school shootings. In a podcast last year, he made the heinous claim that “every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence.” His suggested solution is for black children to be “reparented” and work on farms.
Kennedy has also repeatedly made the false claim that quitting antidepressants is extremely difficult, harder to quit than heroin. But experts have debunked the claim—there is no research to back the suggestion. When Kennedy repeated it in his confirmation hearing in January 2025, Keith Humphreys, who studies addiction at Stanford University, emphasized to NPR that antidepressants and heroin “are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk.”
“In my 35 years in the addiction field, I’ve met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids,” Humphreys said.
Risky rhetoric
Stopping the drugs can lead to withdrawal-like symptoms and should be done in stages under the guidance of a doctor, but only a fraction of people experience these symptoms. A 2024 study in The Lancet estimated that about 15 percent, roughly 1 in 6, will have any symptoms from discontinuation, while only 3 percent, or about 1 in 35, will have symptoms classified as severe.
In the daylong MAHA event on Monday, Kennedy spoke for less than 15 minutes but repeated his false claim about SSRIs and heroin, despite noting that it had been debunked after his confirmation hearing by fact checks and experts. “The New York Times and a lot of other outlets published a response from that saying that the experts disagreed with the secretary,” Kennedy said. “And we all know that whenever they say ‘trust the experts,’ they got nothing.”
Kennedy instead relied on anecdotes of being a heroin addict himself for more than a decade and having a family member who he claimed was suicidal after stopping an SSRI.
Experts have warned that Kennedy’s anecdotes, false claims, and dark messaging are dangerous—and, according to some research, potentially deadly. A 2024 study in Health Affairs found that the wording and media amplification of a safety warning about antidepressants from the Food and Drug Administration in 2003 may have led to thousands of deaths. The warning was intended to increase monitoring of suicidal thoughts, but instead was linked to “unintended reductions in physician visits for depression, depression diagnoses, antidepressant treatment and use, and psychotherapy visits, as well as increases in psychotropic drug poisonings and increased suicide deaths.”
“We strongly object”
In January, two of the co-authors of that 2024 Health Affairs study wrote an opinion piece in Stat News warning of the dangers of Kennedy’s messaging around SSRIs, saying, “[It’s] going to cost lives. The similarity to his anti-vaccine chatter is clear: When you bad-mouth effective, lifesaving vaccines, you end up driving people away from lifesaving medical care.”
But Kennedy is moving beyond just disparaging SSRIs, unveiling on Monday several steps the federal government is taking to discourage their use. That includes training for clinicians and a Dear Colleague Letter that encourages health care providers to consider non-medical alternatives for treating mental health conditions—such as exercise, nutrition, and therapy—while emphasizing the risks and benefits of medications. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) also released guidance to health care providers on how to de-prescribe the drugs for patients. The guidance includes a new billing code for providers to get paid more easily for stepping patients off the drugs.
The moves have already gathered criticism from medical groups, who were not consulted on the new steps or involved with the MAHA event. In a statement, the American Psychiatric Association said that it “welcomes the attention placed squarely on the nation’s mental health crisis.”
But, “we strongly object to framing the nation’s mental health crisis as primarily a problem of ‘overmedicalization’ or ‘overprescribing,’” the association said.
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. … Deprescribing alone is not a sufficient response to this crisis. In psychiatry, as in all areas of medicine, prescribing and deprescribing occur every day as part of individualized, evidence-based treatment planning between physicians and patients. The solution is not to stigmatize psychiatric medication or impose broad assumptions on clinical care, but to ensure that patients have access to the full range of evidence-based treatments and that decisions are guided by the best available science and each patient’s needs.
Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.
