{"id":357254,"date":"2026-01-07T15:41:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T15:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/357254\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T15:41:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T15:41:11","slug":"kennedys-ssri-rhetoric-fuels-distrust-amid-teen-mental-health-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/357254\/","title":{"rendered":"Kennedy’s SSRI rhetoric fuels distrust amid teen mental health crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

While his war on vaccines may be getting more attention, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is coming for another important medical tool: antidepressants. In November, he posted on X<\/a> that the CDC is \u201cfinally confronting the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence.\u201d We fear that in 2026, he may turn his rhetoric into action.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kennedy has in particular made skepticism toward antidepressants for adolescents a centerpiece of his public health agenda, even claiming that antidepressants may be harder to quit than heroin<\/a> \u2014 a stance that ignores decades of evidence about their safety and efficacy. Even worse, he is either oblivious to or ignoring strong evidence that vilifying medications in current antidepressant warnings strongly reduces access<\/a> to all essential mental health care for youth.<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u00a0has not only loudly and repeatedly questioned the value of antidepressants for adolescents, but he has also speciously linked them to violent behavior<\/a> \u2014 specifically to a mass shooting \u2014 with, again, absolutely no evidence. In a September Washington Post op-ed<\/a> he decried mental health screening for children, therapy, and, of course, \u201coverprescription of pharmaceuticals for child mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u2019s willfully uninformed rhetoric on antidepressants is going to cost lives. The similarity to his anti-vaccine chatter is clear: When you bad-mouth effective, lifesaving vaccines, you end up driving people away from lifesaving medical care.<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u2019s antidepressant rhetoric is not only based on bad science, it fuels distrust in mental health treatments at a time when adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide rates are at record highs. If Kennedy\u2019s views shape Food and Drug Administration policy \u2014 for example, through new or expanded black box warnings \u2014 millions of vulnerable patients, including pregnant people and teenagers, could lose access to essential drug treatment and mental health care, even if their availability technically remains the same.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tWhat I learned by going off SSRIs after nearly a decade<\/a><\/p>\n

How do we know? We have seen before how fear-driven messaging about antidepressants can cause catastrophic harm. In our Health Affairs\u00a0systematic review<\/a>, we analyzed the totality of rigorous evidence on the FDA\u2019s existing black box warnings for youth antidepressants. We found that well-intended but mismanaged warnings to doctors, patients, and parents about possible negative impacts have cost several thousand lives.<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2003 and 2004 the Food and Drug Administration issued several health advisories warning that children and adolescents taking antidepressants were at increased risk of suicidal ideation and behavior. In October 2004 the FDA required a boxed warning of this risk to be on the labels of all antidepressant drugs. Then, in May 2007 the FDA extended the warnings to include young adults.<\/p>\n

The basis for those warnings was even at the time contentious. An FDA-solicited meta-analysis suggested a tiny risk for suicidal thoughts for young people starting treatment with antidepressants. However, the trials included in the meta-analysis were never designed<\/a> to measure the risk of suicidality. And the studies never measured<\/a> completed suicides.<\/p>\n

Despite this questionable evidence, the FDA advisories and the boxed warning received repeated and widespread media coverage in major newspapers and television falsely suggesting suicide links. Many news stories used anecdotes and emphasized the risk of antidepressant use by children and adolescents. Thus, well-intended safety warnings became frightening alarms to clinicians, parents, and young people. For example, one\u00a0New York Times headline<\/a> stated \u201cFDA links drugs to being suicidal,\u2019\u201d and another in the\u00a0Washington Post<\/a> reported \u201cFDA confirms antidepressants raise children\u2019s suicide risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

The warnings\u2019 main goal was to increase physician monitoring of suicidal thoughts. Instead, they backfired: Rates of depression diagnoses and care and antidepressant use all plummeted, and youth suicide attempts and deaths rose<\/a>. The evidence is overwhelming: The warnings caused tremendous harm without any documented benefit, likely contributing to thousands of preventable adolescent suicides. And no study has found that mental health care improved or that suicidal behavior and deaths went down because of the warning.<\/p>\n

And possibly most damning of all, thousands of teenagers with serious depression stopped going to the doctor for essential mental health care.<\/p>\n

Rigorous studies of American adolescents consistently and conclusively show that the black box warnings \u2014 which were dramatically amplified in advertisements and in news stories \u2014 resulted in dangerous declines in doctor visits<\/a> and depression diagnosis<\/a> by about a third. This chilling effect, driven by fear and stigma associated with the new warning, clearly increased suicide risks by preventing teens from getting help, from seeing doctors, even though they were suffering from severe depression.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tThe time has come for over-the-counter antidepressants<\/a><\/p>\n

Antidepressants aren\u2019t perfect; no drug or treatment is. But as with vaccines, they are proven to save lives, to be of enormous value, and to have benefits that vastly outweigh any downsides. And again, as with vaccines, once someone in a position of authority sows doubts about efficacy and safety \u2014 wrongly and in the face of all evidence \u2014 you will drive away teens who need our help.<\/p>\n

As faculty members at Harvard and the University of Sydney, we teach Ph.D. students, medical school faculty, and journal editors about the dangers of flawed, untrustworthy studies of health care and policies. Combined with sensational media coverage and advocacy by special interests, such studies have led to ineffective<\/a> or even harmful<\/a> national health policies.<\/p>\n

It should be alarming to all of us that the man with the loudest megaphone in health care \u2014 Kennedy \u2014 is using it in ways that study after study have shown to increase anxiety, decrease doctor visits for severe depression, and drive up suicides.<\/p>\n

Stephen B. Soumerai, Sc.D., is a professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School and studies the unintended harms of unproven health policies. Christine Y. Lu, Ph.D., is a professor at the Sydney Pharmacy School of the University of Sydney and generates evidence to inform health policy decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While his war on vaccines may be getting more attention, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is coming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[33855,102,1906,6623,13214,305,7556,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-357254","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-childrens-health","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-mental-health","11":"tag-mentalhealth","12":"tag-pharmaceuticals","13":"tag-policy","14":"tag-rfk-jr","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}