RFK Jr. Goes After Widely Used Antidepressants, Claiming They Could Be A Threat To Americans

It didn’t take long for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly confirmed Department of Health and Human Services secretary, to challenge the efficacy of a slew of drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders.

Within hours of officially getting the job, Kennedy released a statement detailing some of what he hopes to accomplish in his first few months in President Donald Trump’s administration—including looking into any “threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” or SSRIs.

This class of prescriptions, including drugs like Zoloft, Lexapro, and Prozac, is used by over 13% of American adults. While they can carry side effects and are not recommended for some patients, SSRIs are widely prescribed and have significantly decreased the prevalence of suicide, according to a study out of UCLA.

Kennedy has referred to people who take SSRIs as “addicts” and, during a 2023 livestream with his now colleague Elon Musk, falsely claimed that there is “tremendous circumstantial evidence” that individuals who take SSRIs are more likely to become school shooters.

Zero Democrats voted to confirm Kennedy, while 52 Republicans in the Senate ushered him into the role. Only one Republican senator, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, opposed Trump’s nominee. McConnell, now 82 years old, still walks with a limp and suffers health problems related to his battle with polio, which he contracted as a young child before a vaccine was available. Kennedy, who has peddled conspiracies about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, has repeatedly minimized the effect that the historic polio vaccine had on nearly eradicating the disease.

“In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world,” McConnell said of his decision to vote no on Kennedy. “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”

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The language in Kennedy’s plans, released Thursday in a White House statement titled “Establishing The President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission,” is vague. It’s unclear how the new health secretary would act regarding SSRIs and what avenues for restricting the medication he may pursue. When Kennedy was running for president, he proposed a plan to send people struggling with addiction to “wellness farms” in rural areas.

“I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs,” he said, adding, “if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” (Kennedy later said these farms should be available, but people wouldn’t be forced to attend.)

At his confirmation hearing, Kennedy—who has been open about being a heroin user for more than a decade in his youth—likened SSRIs to the drug, claiming that antidepressants can be even more addicting than heroin. “I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they have getting off of heroin,” Kennedy said in the hearing.

“Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk,” Keith Humphreys, who studies addiction at Stanford University, told NPR in an article debunking Kennedy’s claims. “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.”

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy was asked about his past rebukes of SSRIs by Senator Tina Smith from Minnesota. Smith explained that, when she was younger, she took SSRIs to aid in her struggles with depression, adding that they “helped to clear my mind, get me back on track to being a mom and a wife and a productive, happy person.”

“These statements that you’ve made linking antidepressants to school shootings, they reinforce the stigma that people who experience mental health every day face every single day,” Smith told Kennedy. “And I’m very concerned that this is another example of your record of sharing false and misleading information that actually really hurts people.”

“Senator,” he responded, “you’re mischaracterizing my statements.” “I am only putting into the record what you have said, Mr. Kennedy,” Smith retorted.