Posted on 02/15/2025 7:28:56 AM PST by BenLurkin
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.
...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...
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.”
During the confirmation hearings, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said Kennedy’s statements about antidepressants “reinforce the stigma that people who experience mental health [conditions]…face every single day.”
(Excerpt) Read more at motherjones.com ...
Mother Jones is now part of the MACHINE to be be RAGED over.
Look at the source. It’s Mother Jones.
Lol! Took me a moment before I got it!
Mother Jones, hmmm. Too left-wing to take seriously.
My guess is that Kennedy knows whereof he speaks more than Tina.
Warning: Common sense has determined that watching CNN is hazardous to your brain.
If RFK Jr. was still a Democrat they would be right on board.
The question is, how many mass shootings have anti-depressants prevented over they years? How many suicides have they prevented? Hard to know- millions upon millions of folks are on them. Many are severely depressed. And yes, some do take their own lives after going on meds- but how many wou,d have taken their own lives and/or other’s lives had they not taken any meds? Again, hard to know
Most school shooters means less than 50%. So lets say that there are 12 school shooters in the past 5 years. And 5 have those drugs. Others have other drugs. You could truthfully defend the statement that most school shooters are not taking the specific kind of anti-depressives. That does not at all mean that many aren’t. Or that some of the other drugs aren’t also causing school shooters.
The statement “kids taking anti-depressives are far more likely to shoot up their school over kids taking no medication” can be true even if “most school shooters are not taking this specific anti-depressive..”
Taking away my antidepressants makes me sad, but my Adderall will get me though it.
It’s impossible to quantify. Of course if anti-depressants didn’t work, nobody would be taking them.
Well stated. I cannot pronounce your handle, but what you say is right on!
No antidepressants? How will liberal women survive??
What does “burned” mean? I will say, these medications, Zoloft, specifically, helped me through post partum depression and through my divorce. I did go off them when my teen age son accused me of being a drug addict. I went off everything, including my asthma meds, and managed to do ok. I did have to go back on my migraine meds, topiramate.
So, anyway, as a whole, I think. in my non-medical opinion, Zoloft and Prozac are tried and true. The others not so much. And Prozac and Zoloft work better on women than men, and cardio works just as well. Three sets of tennis, or walking three miles works just as well. But if you have a baby, you can’t get away. Zoloft gives you an extra skin, so you are not so sensitive.
And you also have to be careful of the denominator. They often switch it up. School shooters are actually most often black and Hispanic gang members. When you take them out as they often do when saying “mass shooting”, you are left with the messed up kid on psych drugs and the kid who lost his girlfriend to a football star or teacher.
How much money does Mother Jones make from pharmaceutical advertising?
My dream is that he tells parents that they (almost always) DO NOT have to drug their kids...just SPANK them, at least when they’re young. Western society threw away 5,000 years of child-rearing history because of a few clowns, like Dr. Spock, insisted that the ‘new way’ was better.
*******
No. Hitting is the dumb way. There are no shortcuts.
Antidepressants, Ritalin, etc
my Adderall will get me though it.
******
Adderall=legal meth. Needs to come off the market.
Leftist Mother Jones? As if I’m going to believe anything they have to say. SSRIs help some people, and don’t help others. Prescribing them for kids with behavior problems and depression is risky and everyone knows it. Kids with psych problems are notoriously hard to treat, especially since they are usually accompanied by acting out behavior, which is sometimes really outrageous. I know a foster parent whose FOUR Y.O foster child not only repeatedly stated he was going to kill his little brother (and his birth mother), but had actually attempted to do so. He had to be removed from foster care and placed in in-patient care. He and his siblings had been horribly abused by their parents. It’s a horrible thing when children develop psych problems.
“No. Hitting is the dumb way. There are no shortcuts.”
LOL, it’s worked on you. Sad.
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