Posted on 02/26/2025 8:43:58 AM PST by Red Badger
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made psychiatric medications a focus of his review of the country’s childhood chronic disease crisis, claiming the drugs have been “insufficiently scrutinized” and are addictive.
Childhood psychiatrists insist the drugs, for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression, are nonaddictive and proven safe and say they are more concerned about young Americans unable to access psychiatric medications that could help.
Kennedy emphasized his skepticism of these medications during his Senate confirmation hearings.
“Fifteen percent of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication. Even higher percentages are on SSRIs and benzos. We are not just overmedicating our children, we are overmedicating our entire population,” Kennedy told the Senate Finance Committee.
The exact rate at which American youths are using ADHD medications is hard to ascertain. Kennedy may have been referring to the results of a Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey released in 2023 that found 15 percent of high school seniors reported using a stimulant or nonstimulant ADHD medication.
Kennedy told HHS staff in closed-door meeting last week about the plans for his Make America Healthy Again Commission.
“Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized,” he said, adding, “nothing is going to be off limits.” Among the factors he named were the childhood vaccine schedule, psychiatric drugs and environmental issues such as microplastics.
The commission has 100 days to produce a report on “what is known and what questions remain regarding the childhood chronic disease crisis, and include international comparisons.”
Kennedy has claimed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can be more addictive than heroin, of which he is a longtime recovering addict, and has falsely linked them to school shootings. He avoided denouncing this belief about shootings during his confirmation hearings, only saying, “I don’t think anybody can answer that question.”
According to psychiatrists who work with children, rhetoric like that of Kennedy’s does not help children with mental illnesses.
“Those statements, in my perspective, don’t address the reality of psychiatric treatment,” said Tami Benton, president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry as well as psychiatrist in chief for the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“These medications are not addictive and they’re not at all like heroin,” Benton told The Hill. “People use them for different reasons. … So no, they’re not as addictive as, you know, narcotics.”
As for the claim that U.S. children are being overmedicated, physicians and psychiatric experts who spoke with The Hill said they are more concerned that many children who could benefit from SSRIs or other such medications lack access to these drugs.
“There is some concern, even more so in the field, that many children with depression and mental health disorders do not get access to the mental health services that they need, and that includes the comprehensive treatment that we would recommend, which is beyond just SSRIs, but also therapy and other supports,” said Lisa Fortuna, a child psychiatrist and chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents and Their Families.
Previous studies, such as a 2019 report published in the Pediatrics medical journal by the American Academy of Pediatrics, found that 70 percent of U.S. counties had no child psychiatrists between 2006 and 2017 despite a broader increase in the profession during that time frame.
The researchers noted that “more than half of the children in the United States with a treatable mental health disorder do not receive treatment from a mental health professional.”
Christine Crawford, psychiatrist and associate medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the perception that more children are taking medications for mental illness or psychiatric disorders may be due to growing awareness of these conditions.
“We’re in 2025, and in this day and age, there’s a greater awareness of a variety of psychiatric illnesses that can impact kids. We have treatments that are quite effective that are available for kids, and I appreciate the fact that the stigma kind of related to having a kid on psychiatric medications has decreased over time,” Crawford said.
Psychiatrists say there are issues around children and psychiatric drugs that need to be addressed, such as including them more in medical research.
“We have very few psychiatric medications that are FDA-approved for the use in children,” Crawford noted, referring to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “The reason for that is that there aren’t enough studies that have been conducted, long-term studies, on a variety of different medications.”
“We only have a couple of medications — and this has been the case for years — that are technically FDA-approved, and so the majority of prescribing is done off-label when it comes to kids,” she added.
Should Kennedy seek to limit access to these medications, there are some avenues available to him in his new role.
Typically, drugs are removed from the market by manufacturers if a new, better drug is introduced into the market or the margins aren’t profitable. The FDA can also choose to withdraw approval if clinical evidence demonstrates that a drug is not safe or effective.
But Benton noted that SSRIs such as fluoxetine, better known as Prozac, have been around since the ’80s and have decades of evidence supporting their safety and efficacy. She noted there is another method through which federal authorities could theoretically decrease use of certain drugs, though: their labeling.
“When the black box warning was issued, it decreased the number of people who were actually using SSRIs. And the black box warning suggested that when initiating SSRIs, suicidality is a possible side effect,” Benton said. “The study that supported that warning turned out to not be well-supported.”
“These medications are supported by research. They’re supported by clinical process,” she added. “They really do help people when they’re applied and used in the right way.”
The article makes it sound like the doctor pushback is unique or unusual. Any time HHS does anything, you’ll have pushback from one group or another. That’s the way it works.
Chances are you will get the same effect from sativa aka cleaning weed as opposed to indica aka sleeping weed. My wife even takes delta 9 cbd for sleep and hip pain. I have no idea how it works. She bought a delta 9 smoothie and the next day, the hip pain was gone. The problem is that I can buy THC-A here but not delta 9. The law here makes no sense.
Adderall doesn’t cure behavior. It helps you to focus. It’s basically a stimulant. I knew accountants who were coffee junkies for the same reason.
Very true. Has to be sativa.
I am under the impression that no small number of school shooters had been prescribed psychotropic drugs.
Just my opinion that in many cases the ADHD drugs are BS and in some cases quite dangerous.
(The quoted part is from my all time favorite bumper sticker.)
Before he starts pulling meds, perhaps he ought to get rid of suspicious dyes, preservatives, and high fructose corn syrup. If he and others are correct in saying these items are responsible for ADHD and other psych diagnoses, then the need for these meds should diminish. Kids with cell phone addictions are a separate problem which can only be solved by parents.
The drugs ARE addictive. They are also the primary cause of child suicide. Child suicide was unheard of until the shrinks began pushing these drugs on our youths.
I’m with you on that. Frankly, I’d like them to take the perspective that the government had in the 60’s regarding seat belts and smoking. i.e. education through PSA’s, etc., rather than violating rights. Of course, that didn’t last long...🤣
We start shoving drugs down children’s throats before they even start school and then we wonder why we have a drug problem.
The Sackler family approves.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9339402/
There were two brothers who drove 18 wheel trucks, long haul.
They lived in North Carolina back in the 80s.
They would take amphetamines and do two California turnarounds at one time (Wilmington to LA and back, twice).
They earned enough money to buy a two story old home to remodel.
They were up for an entire week on amphetamines remodeling and decided to make the downstairs one big room. As soon as they cut out all the walls the house started to creek, they got out, and it collapsed in on itself.
That’s my amphetamine story.
I watch the court cases at this website
https://www.youtube.com/@LoneWolfUsul/videos
I observe that a high percent of the defendants have a drug addiction problem. And Meth seems to be their illicit drug of choice.
So does anyone besides me want to see the statistics on kids who took Adderall are now Meth addicts as adults.
When we lived in Polk County, FL in the 90s I had occasion to learn that the county schools had over 𝟮,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗸𝗶𝗱𝘀, 𝗻𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀, 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗗𝗛𝗗 𝗱𝗿𝘂𝗴𝘀. I also learned of the “streamlined” process used to get them on the drugs. BS. Also, threats of bringing in child protection services if parents refused to knuckle under. Just another reason our kid got home schooled.
FASCISTS
They have tried to go after the gun manufacturers. I think it makes more sense to go after those who create and hand out the drugs that lead kids to pull triggers.
All of them. All adult mass shooters too.
The problem is establishing causality for drugs taken by a huge spectrum of Americans that don’t shoot up schools.
Back when my daughter was in about 3rd grade, 1994 or so, we were called in for a ‘conference’ with a ‘counselor’.
The gist of the meeting:
We need to put your daughter on some drugs to calm her down in class.
My immediate reaction:
HOW ABOUT I THROW YOUR ASS OUT THAT WINDOW RIGHT BEHIND YOU?
End of meeting.
No drugs.
Daughter is 38 years old and a professional..........
The researchers noted that “more than half of the children in the United States with a treatable mental health disorder do not receive treatment from a mental health professional.”
Oh. How would they know this? They just make these numbers up.
If psych drugs help then it would be logical that people on these drugs would be less likely to shoot their coworkers. Yet every shooter is on these drugs. Shrinks claim that half of people who are mentally ill don’t get the treatment they need. So why are all shooters getting treatment?
The treatments cause this carnage. The psychologists and psychiatrists are full aware of this. Increased violence allows these frauds to lobby for more mental health funding. The result is always more violence, not less.
I LOVE to read and have issues reading something that does not interest me.
That's not a sign of ADD or ADHD or anything else.
It's a normal human reaction to reading something that bores you out of your mind.
Apparently, his solution is to feed them better and let them play outside and burn it off.
I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the numbers of kids who live in the country and live and work on farms being on these drugs compared to city kids who live with their hands glued to electronics 90% of their waking hours.
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