President Donald Trump instructed the newly sworn-in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to examine the role of psychological medications in the chronic disease and mental health epidemics among young people as part of a comprehensive project to make America’s children healthy again.
Following Kennedy’s Thursday morning confirmation for secretary of health and human services, Trump issued an executive order establishing a Make America Healthy Again Commission, composed of multiple departments and sub-level agencies.
Chaired by Kennedy, the commission has been tasked with issuing a sweeping strategy to tackle childhood chronic diseases, ranging from mental health to diabetes and obesity, and presenting it to the president by August.
In the initial assessment of the childhood chronic disease epidemic, Trump directed Kennedy and his team to analyze the possible “over-utilization of medication” and other chemical exposures that could be harming children.
The order also specifically requires the committee to examine “the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.”
During his independent presidential campaign and even since joining forces with Trump, Kennedy has focused on mental health and neurological conditions, in particular autism spectrum disorders, or ASD, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.
Kennedy faced significant scrutiny during his two days of Senate confirmation hearings because of his long history of skepticism of vaccines, including his support for the debunked premise that vaccines cause ASD.
The former environmentalist Democrat-turned-Republican health guru has also been chastised by critics as having a myriad of conflicts of interest in regulating the pharmaceutical industry, against which Kennedy has spent much of his career litigating.
The executive order’s identification of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, a common class of antidepressants, is also notable in part because Kennedy suggested during his confirmation hearings that getting off of SSRIs is more difficult than quitting heroin.
As of May 2023, nearly 30% of Americans of all age brackets reported being diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives, 10 percentage points higher than in 2015.
The monthly antidepressant dispensing rate for young people aged 12-25 in the United States increased by 66.3% from 2016 to 2022, according to a study published last year by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The increase was aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors suggest.
Regarding the causes of autism, the executive order repeats the hotly debated statistic, which Kennedy relies upon heavily, that ASD affects 1-in-36 children today, compared to 4-in-10,000 in the 1980s. Many medical scientists attribute this substantial increase to changes in diagnostic patterns, not environmental toxins or other chemical exposures.
The order highlights that the economic and physical burden of chronic health conditions, in particular mental health conditions, has “continued to increase alongside increased prescription medication.”
“For example, in the case of Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, over 3.4 million children are now on medication for the disorder — up from 3.2 million children in 2019-2020 — and the number of children being diagnosed with the condition continues to rise,” reads the order.
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Trump posted on X shortly after signing the executive order and swearing in Kennedy that he believes Kennedy will “lead a great national mission to MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN.”
“I think he’s going to do things that will really make us very proud,” said Trump.
