Kennedy now targeting psychiatric drugs for children

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to make this country healthier.

He is targeting additives to food, and now he is branching out to drugs given to children for their mental health.

Kennedy claims the drugs are addictive to the kids as well as being “insufficiently scrutinized.”

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I have friends who had kids who were prescribed these drugs at a very young age, and I have to say, not many of them turned out very well.

Be it the dependence on drugs or something else, most of them had significant problems as adults, which led, in one case, to suicide.

Kennedy stated, “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.”

Doctors have pushed back, stating that prescriptions given for conditions such as ADHD and depression are not addictive, and they have been proven safe.

Doctors have also stated that Kennedy’s rhetoric is not helping the situation.

For instance, 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, stated, “Those statements, in my perspective, don’t address the reality of psychiatric treatment.”

She added, “These medications are not addictive and they’re not at all like heroin.

“People use them for different reasons. … So no, they’re not as addictive as, you know, narcotics.”

Lisa Fortuna, a child psychiatrist and chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents and Their Families, added, “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.”

I am not a medical expert, so I have no real position here other than my personal feeling, which is that far too often, doctors reach for that little pad to write a script instead of actually addressing the problem.

I know people who simply cannot exist without their medication, but I have also seen the negative effects of it, as noted above.

Hopefully, Kennedy and doctors can figure this out so the best course of treatment is given to these children.