According to the National Health Interview Survey, 16.5 percent of Americans take some sort of prescription medication for their mental health. Even if you don’t take a mental health medication, you’re almost certainly close to someone who does whether you know it or not.
And if you don’t think you know anyone who takes a prescription for their mental health, you know me.
When I was about 14 or 15, I started developing terrible anxiety. Over time, my anxiety began to manifest in the form of obsessive compulsive disorder. Before I could go to sleep each night, I had a checklist of things I had to do — often multiple times — to ease my anxiety before I went to bed. Eventually, this checklist stretched to an hour in length. Suffice it to say, I was absolutely miserable.
On top of the anxiety, I began experiencing good old-fashioned depression. “Everyone feels sad sometimes,” you might say. Oh, but this wasn’t that. I would be out and about, having a good time with friends or family on a bright clear day, not a care in the world, when without warning, a black wave of despair would crash over me. There would be no warning, no trigger. I would just suddenly feel deeply, cataclysmically depressed for no particular reason.
I wasn’t crazy about seeing a doctor, but when I was 16, I finally agreed to it. The doctor recommended I try taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (or SSRI). He said that my brain, like the brains of many people, had a chemical imbalance that could be corrected by taking this medication. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea — I didn’t want to walk around feeling drugged-up all the time — but I was so miserable that I agreed to try it for a couple of months and see how I felt.
After a couple of weeks, I realized that for the first time in years, I felt NORMAL. I didn’t feel at all like I was drugged — if anything, I felt far more clear-headed. I no longer felt the need to go through a stupid checklist before I hit the sack. I still felt anxiety and depression, but I felt them when it was appropriate to do so, when something happened that would make anyone feel anxious or depressed. It was life-changing.
I’ve been taking an SSRI for 24 years now — specifically, I take citalopram, which is the generic form of Celexa. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone — I’m not a doctor — but it’s worked wonders for me. And I don’t feel any shame in taking it, any more than someone with high blood pressure or diabetes should feel ashamed for taking a vasodilator or insulin.
Having said that, I never really expected to broadcast to the world that I take a brain pill, but it feels important to do so. This is because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to take prescription mental health medication away from me and 55 million other American citizens.
RFK Jr., our newly-minted Secretary of Health and Human Services, has called upon the federal government to combat the “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. He wants the government to “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers.” In the past, RFK Jr. has claimed that people taking antidepressants are more likely to be school shooters (this is objectively untrue based on actual data) and has called people like me who take SSRIs “addicts.”
How does RFK Jr. want to help wean people off these drugs he believes are so dangerous? With labor camps, of course! During a videotaped podcast last week, RFK Jr. said, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go off these illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, get off SSRIs, to get off of benzos, get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.”
You know, I’m going to give RFK Jr. credit for one thing. I never would have thought that conservatives would rally behind a woo-woo New Age moonbat former heroin addict antivaxxer granola hippie, but I guess if you put all that BS in a tailored suit and give it a face that looks like it caught fire at a track meet and someone put it out with a track shoe, it lends a veneer of respectability to the message. If he didn’t have a famous last name, RFK Jr. would be the aging stockboy at a natural foods co-op who’s been relegated to third shift because he won’t stop creeping on the college girls and would go home every morning to a run-down RV that doesn’t have a working shower because he’d rather spend the money on crystals that make you virile.
If RFK Jr. succeeds in taking aim at SSRIs, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers, I’ll be in rough shape (unless of course I can buy my medication in bulk from another country that still has a functioning government). I’ll be depressed, anxious, and struggling. And you know what? I’d be one of the lucky ones. Even at my worst point, I was still making straight As in school, so I expect I could hold down a job, I’d just be miserable while doing so.
But I personally know people who wouldn’t be so lucky. I know people who literally cannot function without their mental health medication. If RFK Jr. is successful in his deranged mission, people are going to lose their jobs, people are going to lose their relationships, and yes, people are going to die, most likely by their own hand.
The argument I’ve heard from the right regarding RFK Jr.’s plan is simple: he won’t be able to do it. Either federal judges will step in and slap his wrist or powerful pharmaceutical companies will flex their money and influence and prevent the federal government from taking people’s medications away.
For what it’s worth, I think that argument is likely correct. But if the best defense against Trump’s cronies is that an overstretched judiciary or a corporate overlord won’t allow them to do the things they desperately want to do, it begs the question: wouldn’t it have been simpler to just appoint qualified candidates who want to help Americans instead of dangerous crackpots who want to hurt us?
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