RFK Jr. targets childhood psychiatric drugs; doctors push back
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made psychiatric medications a focus of his review of the country’s childhood chronic disease crisis, claiming they’ve been “insufficiently scrutinized” and are addictive.
Childhood psychiatrists insist the drugs, for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression, are nonaddictive and proven safe and say they are more concerned about young Americans unable to access psychiatric medications that could help.
Kennedy emphasized his skepticism of these medications during his Senate confirmation hearings.
“Fifteen percent of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication. Even higher percentages are on SSRIs and benzos. We are not just overmedicating our children, we are overmedicating our entire population,” Kennedy told the Senate Finance Committee.
The exact rate at which American youths are using ADHD medications is hard to ascertain. Kennedy may have been referring to the results of a Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey released in 2023 that found 15 percent of high school seniors reported using a stimulant or non-stimulant ADHD medication.
Kennedy told HHS staff in closed-door meeting last week about the plans for his Make America Healthy Again Commission.
“Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized,” he said, adding, “nothing is going to be off limits.” Among the factors he named were the childhood vaccine schedule, psychiatric drugs and environmental issues like microplastic.
The commission has 100 days to produce a report on “what is known and what questions remain regarding the childhood chronic disease crisis, and include international comparisons.”
Kennedy has claimed that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can be more addictive than heroin, of which he is a longtime recovering addict, and has falsely linked them to school shootings. He avoided denouncing this belief about shootings during his confirmation hearings, only saying, “I don’t think anybody can answer that question.”
According to psychiatrists who work with children, rhetoric like that of Kennedy’s does not help children with mental illnesses.
“Those statements, in my perspective, don't address the reality of psychiatric treatment,” said Tami Benton, president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry as well as psychiatrist in chief for the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“These medications are not addictive and they're not at all like heroin,” Benton told The Hill. “People use them for different reasons. ... So no, they're not as addictive as, you know, narcotics.”
As for the claim that U.S. children are being overmedicated, physicians and psychiatric experts who spoke with The Hill said they are more concerned that many children who could benefit from SSRIs or other such medications lack access to these drugs.
“There is some concern, even more so in the field, that many children with depression and mental health disorders do not get access to the mental health services that they need, and that includes the comprehensive treatment that we would recommend, which is beyond just SSRIs, but also therapy and other supports,” said Lisa Fortuna, a child psychiatrist and chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents and Their Families.
Previous studies, such as a 2019 study published in the Pediatrics medical journal by the American Academy of Pediatrics, found that 70 percent of U.S. counties had no child psychiatrists between 2006 and 2017 despite a broader increase in the profession during that time frame.
The researchers noted that “more than half of the children in the United States with a treatable mental health disorder do not receive treatment from a mental health professional.”
Christine Crawford, psychiatrist and associate medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the perception that more children are taking medications for mental illness or psychiatric disorders may be due to growing awareness of these conditions.
“We're in 2025 and in this day and age, there's a greater awareness of a variety of psychiatric illnesses that can impact kids. We have treatments that are quite effective that are available for kids, and I appreciate the fact that the stigma kind of related to having a kid on psychiatric medications has decreased over time,” Crawford said.
Psychiatrists say there are issues around children and phychiatric drugs that need to be addressed, such as including them more in medical research.
“We have very few psychiatric medications that are FDA-approved for the use in children,” noted Crawford. “The reason for that is that there aren't enough studies that have been conducted, long term studies, on a variety of different medications.”
“We only have a couple of medications, and this has been the case for years, that are technically FDA-approved, and so the majority of prescribing is done off-label when it comes to kids,” she added.
Should Kennedy seek to limit access to these medications, there are some avenues available to him in his new role.
Typically, drugs are removed from the market by manufacturers if a new, better drug is introduced into the market or the margins aren’t profitable. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can also choose to withdraw approval if clinical evidence demonstrates that a drug is not safe or effective.
But Benton noted that SSRIs like fluoxetine, better known as Prozac, have been around since the '80s and have decades of evidence supporting their safety and efficacy. She noted there is another method through which federal authorities could theoretically decrease use of certain drugs: their labeling.
“When the black box warning was issued, it decreased the number of people who were actually using SSRIs. And the black box warning suggested that when initiating SSRIs, suicidality is a possible side effect,” Benton said. “The study that supported that warning turned out to not be well supported.”
“These medications are supported by research. They're supported by clinical process,” she added. “They really do help people when they're applied and used in the right way.”
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