Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease.

The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense.

But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”

Kennedy has repeatedly railed against what he sees as rampant overprescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly known as SSRIs, which treat depression and anxiety and include medications like Prozac and Zoloft. As with his previous assertions about vaccines, many of his statements about these drugs are not backed by science.

In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, he claimed that “tremendous circumstantial evidence” suggested that people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.) Kennedy has also called people who take SSRIs addicts—and then tried to claim he didn’t during his confirmation hearings.

When government researchers follow Kennedy’s orders to study SSRIs, they’ll find reams of research, including long-term studies, that have found that the drugs are safe and non-addictive. That’s good news for the 13 percent of American adults who use SSRIs to treat depression and anxiety.

In addition to this well-documented track record of safety, manufacturers have closely monitored adverse reactions to the drugs in children and teens. The Food and Drug Administration already requires drug manufacturers to include warnings in packaging because of some evidence that SSRIs can cause a temporary increase in suicidal thoughts in pediatric patients (though evidence on this point is mixed

So despite this evidence, what options does Kennedy offer in response to the supposed overprescription of and addiction to SSRIs? In a podcast appearance last July, Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.”

He added, “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, 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.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.

Last modified: February 16, 2025