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.”

The summit was hosted by the MAHA Institute, a Washington think tank founded a year ago by the Make America Healthy Again movement and led in part by Tony Lyons, a book publisher who blames a combination of Tylenol and a vaccine he hasn’t specified for his daughter’s autism. MAHA’s anti-vax effort, among its loudest campaigns as President Trump took office for the second time, has been derided by scientists and dismissed by much of the public. (Though Kennedy has denied it, the White House has reportedly asked him to mute his anti-vax arguments for fear of damaging the president’s candidates in the midterm elections.)

The mission to reform psychiatry, though, may prove to have more broad appeal. According to a large study conducted in 2025, one in six U.S. adults are presently on an antidepressant, but doubts about these drugs have been growing. Kennedy’s campaign comes after years of steadily accumulating critiques of psychotropic drugs and condemnation of pharmaceutical industry influence. Research comparing medications with placebos has repeatedly called the benefits of S.S.R.I.s into question, and lately the side effects of these drugs, including the possibility of irreversible sexual dysfunction, have stirred a surge of attention.