GoKawiilUS health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has been critical of antidepressant drugs.Credit: Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty
Overdiagnosis, overmedication and withdrawal: that’s the bleak picture of US mental-health treatment painted at a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) wellness summit attended by US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the driving force behind the MAHA movement.
The summit, which was held on 4 May in Washington DC, focused on what the group argues is the widespread overuse of drugs to treat mental-health conditions. Some speakers described agonizing withdrawal symptoms when they tried to wean off antidepressants. Others attacked what they characterized as an overdiagnosis of mental-health disorders in children.
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“Our goal is straightforward: to reduce unnecessary dependence on medication, to improve patient outcomes and to return control to the patients,” Kennedy said at the summit, which was hosted by the MAHA Institute, a think tank in Washington DC that champions Kennedy’s work. “This is how we’re going to make America healthy again.”
The MAHA movement focuses on chronic disease, which it links to factors such as poor diet and exposure to environmental toxins. Its adherents have also taken aim at the pharmaceutical industry, and some are wary of vaccines and conventional drugs. Even so, Kennedy and others at the summit noted that medication remains an important component of treatment for some people with mental-health disorders.
Nature asked researchers to comment on MAHA advocates’ latest claims about mental-health treatment.
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On the day of the summit, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which Kennedy heads, released a letter to health-care providers urging them to consider alternatives to medication when treating mental-health conditions. One in six adults in the United States takes an antidepressant, Kennedy said at the summit, and one in ten children uses prescription medication for their mental health. “That’s not a marginal issue,” Kennedy said. “This is a system-level pattern.”
Or, put simply: America has “a pill culture,” says Timothy Westlake, chief of staff at the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Rockville, Maryland.
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