R.F.K. Jr.’s Newest Mission: Getting Us Off Antidepressants

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**Michael Barbaro** (0:37)
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
In his latest public health crusade, Robert F. Kennedy Jr is asking why millions of Americans have been taking psychiatric drugs for far longer than ever intended.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:55)
I have been on Zoloft since I was eight years old.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:59)
I've continuously been on antidepressants for 27 years.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:01)
I've been on Luvox for 30 years.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:04)
I've been on them longer than I've not been on them.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:07)
In the process, he's highlighting an open secret in medicine, that doctors are much better at starting drug treatments than at stopping them.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:17)
I was told to take it daily and I never questioned that.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:20)
I don't really think I even asked or thought about how long I would be on it.

**SPEAKER_7** (1:25)
I did not know that I was going to be on them for the rest of my life.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:28)
And that patients who want to end their treatment are increasingly taking matters into their own hands.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:36)
All of a sudden, I felt so strongly that my brain was like, you need to get off this medication.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:43)
Today, Ellen Barry takes us inside the growing movement to de-prescribe. It's Monday, June 22nd.
Ellen, nice to have you on the show.

**Ellen Barry** (2:06)
Thank you for having me.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:08)
Let me just start by asking how you came to this topic of de-prescribing, and for the uninitiated, can you just define that phrase?

**Ellen Barry** (2:17)
De-prescribing is the art and science of carefully tapering off a psychiatric medication or reducing a psychiatric medication.
I first heard the term really from patient groups. There has long been a subculture of people who talk to each other on the Internet about being harmed by medication or feeling that their medication isn't working anymore who compare notes on how to get off them. Those communities, that's nothing new. They've been out there for decades, really since the early days of social media. But what's new is that this group, largely of patients, now has a seat at the table as federal health policy is developed. And that's because of RFK.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (3:07)
Jr. I want to thank President Trump for entrusting me to deliver on his promise to make America healthy again.

**Ellen Barry** (3:17)
Secretary Kennedy made it clear during his confirmation hearings that one of the things he was looking at would be curbing the use of psychiatric medications in the US.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (3:28)
Fifteen percent of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication.

**Ellen Barry** (3:35)
He talked specifically about antidepressants in those hearings. That these medications were sort of dependence forming, that we prescribe them too freely.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (3:45)
Even higher percentages are on SSRIs and Benzos. We are not just over-medicating our children, we're over-medicating our entire population.

**Ellen Barry** (3:54)
And what he was talking about was the most widely used category of psychiatric medications, SSRIs.

**Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** (4:02)
Listen, I know people, including members of my family, who've had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than people have getting off of heroin.

**Ellen Barry** (4:11)
He said that SSRI antidepressants are harder to quit than heroin.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:15)
Huh, is that true?

**Ellen Barry** (4:17)
No, there's no evidence supporting that.
SSRIs are used by probably around 35 million American adults. These are selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors like Prozac or Zoloft or Lexapro. They're considered so safe to prescribe that overwhelmingly, they're prescribed by family doctors or GPs rather than psychiatrists. They're used for an ever expanding array of different problems, not just for depression, but also for all kinds of anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, PTSD, and that list has just continued to get longer.

**Michael Barbaro** (5:10)
Right. And here he is assailing and questioning the most widely used medication in basically all of mental health.