RFK Jr. Goes After SSRIs. The Wrong Drug. The Wrong Patients.

SSRIs are vital medications for older Americans. His use of Medicare to advance his non-evidenced based position on these medications will cause significant harm to an at-risk population.

On Monday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a federal push to scale back SSRI prescribing. The plan includes new Medicare and Medicaid payments to clinicians who help patients taper, federal training modules, and “deprescribing” guidelines drafted by a yet-to-be-named expert panel. About 1 in 6 American adults take an SSRI. Kennedy has previously compared quitting SSRIs to quitting heroin. He has linked them, without evidence, to school shootings. He repeated the heroin comparison Monday.

The vehicle for the new push is Medicare and Medicaid. In other words, the oldest and the poorest Americans. The two populations most likely to need their psychiatric medications and least equipped to navigate a deprescribing bureaucracy designed by a man with no medical training.

I cannot speak to the Medicaid population. I can speak to older Americans and medication.

I worked as a project manager on the HEALing Communities Study. HCS, launched in 2019 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and SAMHSA,…