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.”
Spoken by someone who has never had true ADHD children or grandchildren. Is there abuse by some medical ‘experts’ and misdiagnosis, Hell Yes! Are too many children put on medication because parents and/ or teachers don’t want to or can’t deal with them ? Hell Yes! But that doesn’t mean ADHD doesn’t exist or that there aren’t children whose ADHD who need medication to be able to function properly doesn’t exist or that there aren’t legitimate medications to help them.
This reminds me of the uninformed hysteria over Opioids and the ‘experts’ in the public pontificating that there is no legitimate need for them because they are ‘deadly’ and refuse to recognize that people with severe chronic pain need to take them to just get through the day and get no pleasure out of them.
There is an entire industry that profits from drugging children.
It is disgusting and needs to be shut down.
And still no covid jab action.
I’m going to have to make a special meme for RFK Jr in a number of days...
It's just a theory of mine based on personal experience of how these drugs deaden personality and empathy, and how psychiatrists hand them out like candy for any and all childhood behavioral issues, steadily increasing dosages as the behaviors persist or worsen.
Nonsense, You don’t know what you are talking about. Pill peddler?
Just my opinion but maybe some kids will benefit from the medication. The rest should spend a summer, in a nice camp, without internet or cell phones, chopping wood. They need to experience some of life and brotherhood/sisterhood camaraderie outside of their helicopter parents and their tiny screens.
That was excellent parenting.
Mine is 41. Also a professional who has traveled all over the world.
When she entered college at 16 (she insisted going out of state) her counselor said in his first meeting “I love homeschooled” students.
Disclaimer, she did attend public high school, which required zilch effort.
Wow, my same story, except it was second grade (my son)
Pulled him out to homeschool him. He’s 30 now and doing wonderfully (in life and career). Never needed the drugs, just needed to learn to direct his energy
Adderall is not for people who do not need it. for them it functions as speed, an upper
People who need Adderall do not feel any racy effects. they just are focused, slower and organized.
My son chopped wood and did yard work for about 45 minutes before we began homeschooling seat work each day. Of course we had the normal homeschool abbreviated day, and lots of read aloud time with all four of them.
The NYS Homeschool regulations require instruction to be 5 hours/day, 5 days/week, or the substantial equivalent thereof.
My out, because my kids could get their lessons done in far less time and they knew the material.
NYS guidelines also allow for a teacher to only need to complete 80% of the curriculum.
So on thinking it through, I figured that the goal of the schooling was for them to master the material for that year. If they did that, I considered it *the substantial equivalent thereof*, especially since we always finished the full 100% of the curriculum.
And they had the standardized test scores to prove it.
For part of the year, my kids swam competitively with the local *Y* and while they were swimming and practicing most nights each week, they were very well behaved.
A week after the season was over, you could tell. What a difference getting it out of their systems made.
Not addictive??? You shouldn’t quit without proper psychiatric supervision, or you will go off your rocker, or even die. Not addictive. peee shaw.
My brother was on it, and the “Dogturd” took him ever up and up in dosage. He finally broke, when he was found with a shotgun shooting holes in the floor of his house. He literally had cookie sheets as chest protector, and tin foil under his baseball cap. Claimed Hondurans were under the house and spying on him. He voluntarily committed under family pressure, and now does not use these prescription drugs. Did I forget to mention the rays from space?
As soon as he was clean and sober, all of the insanity was gone. Ritalin, very very dangerous stuff.
My brother, aged 60 was on them for 15 years. I mentioned it in a previous reply.
Bastards just can't help themselves ...
The biggest problem with pharmaceutical companies, is they are allowed to advertise on TV, and in magazines. The pharmaceutical Medical Education system, must be severed.
My theory is brain in head and distributed brain in body.
Moving the muscles worked on brain in body which modulated brain in head
Well, my GI practitioner said that they have found the same neural tissue that is in the brain is in the gut and the connection between the two is the vagas nerve.
So it wouldn’t surprise me to find out there is indeed more *brain* in the body than they realized before.
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