HHS Secretary RFK Jr. Pushes Doctors to Help Patients Stop Taking Antidepressants

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says doctors need to do more to help patients safely stop taking antidepressants. He announced a new effort Monday aimed at reducing what he calls an overreliance on psychiatric drugs.

“The U.S. doesn’t just face a mental health crisis; we face a dependency crisis driven by overmedication,” Kennedy said at a MAHA Institute conference. “One in six adults takes an antidepressant and one in 10 children are on a prescription for mental health … Too many patients begin treatment without a clear understanding of the risks or how long they’ll stay on these drugs or how they’ll come off them.”

Kennedy has a long history of opposing antidepressant use. Last year, he posted on X that the CDC would “confront the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence.”

As part of the initiative, HHS sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to physicians. According to an HHS press release, the letter “encourages providers to prioritize informed consent and shared decision-making, and to regularly review the risks and benefits of psychiatric medications with patients.” It also highlights non-drug approaches like family support, therapy, nutrition, and exercise when appropriate.

The letter includes billing codes that allow doctors to get paid for tasks related to stopping medications and using “evidence-based nonmedication treatments.”

“Psychiatric medicines have a role in care, but we will no longer treat them as the default,” Kennedy said at the event.

Also on Monday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released guidance for doctors on “the importance of deprescribing and related medical care,” according to HHS. This guidance explains how clinicians can get paid by Medicare for helping patients stop medications. It also points doctors to resources like professional guidelines, peer-reviewed protocols for stopping drugs, and FDA instructions for gradually reducing doses.

At the conference, Kennedy claimed personal expertise on the issue. “I made a statement early on in my administration that withdrawal from SSRIs can be more difficult than withdrawal from heroin,” he said. “The New York Times said experts disagree … We all know when they say, ‘trust the experts,’ they’ve got nothing. I happen to be an actual expert on this because I was addicted to heroin for 14 years.”

Kennedy said heroin withdrawal lasts about 72 hours of misery, but he said stopping SSRIs is far worse. “I’ve watched people come off SSRIs and it’s not even comparable,” he said. He added that one family member “was suicidal literally every day … I’ve heard that from hundreds of people and it’s the same story again and again.”

He noted that doctors often tell patients the withdrawal effects “are the original symptom reasserting itself; you need to get back on the SSRI,” which can trap people in a lifetime cycle.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) responded cautiously to the HHS announcement. “APA welcomes the attention placed squarely on the nation’s mental health crisis and is committed to advancing solutions that improve access to high-quality evidence-based care,” the group said in a statement. “We are supportive of the Administration’s plans for further investment in research and clinician training on the issues of prescribing and deprescribing.”

However, the APA pushed back on the idea that overmedication is the main problem. “While APA supports efforts to improve the quality, safety, and evidence base of mental health treatment, we strongly object to framing the nation’s mental health crisis as primarily a problem of ‘overmedicalization’ or ‘overprescribing.’ That characterization oversimplifies a complex crisis and ignores the larger reality: too many patients cannot access timely, comprehensive care, while care remains unevenly distributed across our health system,” the group added. “It also fails to account for persistent workforce shortages, limited psychiatric beds, inadequate visit time, barriers to psychotherapy and social supports, insufficient integration of psychiatric expertise in primary care through the Collaborative Care model, and the lack of a true continuum of care.”

“Deprescribing alone is not a sufficient response to this crisis,” the APA continued. “In psychiatry, as in all areas of medicine, prescribing and deprescribing occur every day as part of individualized, evidence-based treatment planning between physicians and patients. The solution is not to stigmatize psychiatric medication or impose broad assumptions on clinical care, but to ensure that patients have access to the full range of evidence-based treatments and that decisions are guided by the best available science and each patient’s needs.”

The APA and five other psychiatric and psychopharmacology groups also issued a joint statement a year ago defending the safety of antidepressants and other psychiatric medications. Published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the statement said: “The safety and efficacy of traditional antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers (such as lithium and some anticonvulsants) and stimulant medications have been established through decades of rigorous research, randomized clinical trials, peer-reviewed studies, meta-analyses, national registry studies of thousands of people, post-marketing pharmacovigilance monitoring, and FDA oversight.” The groups added that these drugs help many young people participate in treatment, school, and social activities. They warned that “efforts to discourage, stigmatize, or curtail the use of evidence-based treatments for mental illness will have serious deleterious consequences, particularly for individuals with serious mental illness, their loved ones, and the communities in which they live.”

Protect Our Care, a nonprofit focused on making healthcare affordable and equitable, criticized the HHS announcement. The group said in a statement: “While RFK Jr.’s HHS makes no mention of how they intend to incentivize therapists to be in-network with private insurance and Medicare, major studies and surveys have shown that 82.7% of psychotherapists did not accept any public insurance like Medicare while more than one-third of practicing psychologists do not accept private insurance.” The group also noted that the Trump administration’s 2027 budget plan proposes cutting over half a billion dollars from mental health programs and eliminating the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Source: MedPage Today