Can Kennedy Save Kids from Psychiatric Ravage?

(Brownstone)—President Trump issued an executive order last week creating a Make America Healthy Again Commission, to be chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Among other targets, the commission will examine “prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors [SSRIs], antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.”

Kennedy has been outspoken on the danger of SSRIs, linking them to school shootings and stating that members of his family “had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they have getting off of heroin.”

Kennedy’s views mortify the mainstream media. The Washington Post did a hefty piece portraying Kennedy’s commission as more dangerous than any drugs prescribed to children. To discover the absolute truth, the Post turned to the CEO of the American Psychiatric Association, who assured the Post that “psychiatric drugs can be very effective and generally are given to children carefully after front-line treatments such as talk therapy.”

Decades ago, who would have expected an apology for Adderall, Prozac, Zoloft, and similar drugs to sound like a pitch for Kellogg’s breakfast cereals? Prescription drug use is skyrocketing. Antidepressant prescriptions for young Americans aged 12 to 25 increased by 66% between 2016 and 2022.

The New York Times reported last year that many young people were left worse off thanks to “mental health interventions.” The Times showcased psychiatric “prevalence inflation” – a vast increase in reported mental illness among teenagers who are encouraged to view normal feelings as grave maladies requiring intervention. Oxford University psychologist Lucy Foulkes observed that school programs are “creating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional.”

Foulkes explained that “awareness efforts” spur young people “to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems.” Filing such complaints “leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms, because labeling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual’s self-concept and behavior in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling.”

Like a New Yorker cartoon from the 1950s, psychiatric diagnoses have become status symbols, propelled by snake oil “social-emotional learning” programs. University of Southern California clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe warns that mental illness labels have “become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique. That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.” Psychiatric labels can become a ball-and-chain that people drag behind them. Endless classroom presentations on mental health spur “co-rumination” – excessively talking about one’s problems – which evokes memories of first dates from hell.

Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz warned in the last century, “Psychiatrists manufacture mental diagnoses the way the Vatican manufactures saints.” But protests by Szasz and other dissident shrinks did nothing to prevent a sham stampede.

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) now lists more than 300 mental illnesses, five times as many as it specified in the 1960s. Dr. Allen Frances, writing in Psychology Today, warned that the latest DSM contained “many changes that seem clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound” and is “likely to lead to massive over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication.”

After the DSM redefined autism in the 1990s, the autism rate “quickly multiplied almost 100 fold.” Thanks to another DSM redefinition, the “number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold” between 1993 and 2004, the New York Times reported. Psychiatrist Laurent Mottron complained in 2023 that the latest version of the DSM “is full of vague and trivial definitions and ambiguous language that ensures more people fall into various, abnormal categories.”

The DSM provides a road map for federal law. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compels schools and universities to provide “reasonable accommodation” to students who claim to have a disability, physical or mental. Even before the pandemic, up to 25% of students at top colleges were “classified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety, entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer time to take exams,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 2018. Similar string-pulling occurs for the rigorous entrance exams for New York City’s elite high schools, where “white students…are 10 times as likely as Asian students to have a [disability] designation that allows extra time,” the New York Times reported.

Between 2008 and 2019, the number of undergraduate students diagnosed with anxiety increased by 134%, 106% for depression, 57% for bipolar disorder, 72% for ADHD, 67% for schizophrenia, and 100% for anorexia, according to the National College Health Assessment. Students’ struggles skyrocketed after Covid shutdowns. A Boston University analysis of students on almost 400 campuses in 2022 found that “60% of the respondents met the qualifying criteria for ‘one or more mental health problems, a nearly 50% increase from 2013.’” But awarding endless psychiatric Purple Hearts will do nothing to help college graduates adjust to the challenges of life beyond the classroom.

I recognized that the DSM was becoming unhinged after attending the 1986 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington. Here are some riffs from a Detroit News op-ed I wrote at that time:

The APA served attendees a batch of freshly-ordained mental illnesses, including “premenstrual dysphoric disorder.” The APA says symptoms of this “mental illness” include “irritability,” “marked fatigue,” and “negative evaluation of self.” According to the APA’s definition, a third of all women go crazy once a month.

The second newly ordained mental illness is “self-defeating personality type,” previously known as common or garden-variety masochism. The symptoms for this grade disorder include, “complaints, directly or indirectly, about being unappreciated,” “repeatedly turns down opportunities for pleasure,” and “remains in relationships in which others… take advantage of him or her.” Bring on the Valium!

The third “discovery” was guaranteed to raise the APA’s popularity with trial lawyers. The APA tentatively decided that anyone who persistently fantasizes about or actively forces a non-consenting person to have sex suffers from “paraphilic rapism.” In other words, a person would have to be nuts to rape somebody. As one protester at the APA’s meeting declared, “Sexual assault is a crime – not a mental disorder.” The Committee of Women of the APA said the new category would “provide an instant insanity plea for anyone charged with rape.”

If shrinks only cleaned out people’s wallets, then they would be no more harmful than your average politician. But psychiatrists nowadays routinely rely on mind-numbering drugs and mind-shattering electric shock treatments. Some mental patients are developing Parkinson’s disease symptoms as a result of years of heavy medication. Electric shock “therapy” – aside from being a terrifying experience – sometimes causes permanent memory loss, thus making it harder for a patient to handle reality.

We have new mental illnesses not because of new breakthroughs in understanding the mind, but because psychiatrists want more money and more power over the rest of us. Shrinks generally have a poor batting average for curing known mental problems – but that has not stopped them from creating new “illnesses” that supposedly they alone can treat. But a con artist with an MD is still a con artist.

My carping did nothing to slow the white-coated hucksters. In 2019, the American Psychological Association officially designated traditional masculinity as a de facto mental illness. Their new guidelines specifically state that “stoicism” and other traits are “on the whole, harmful.” Did Marcus Aurelius spin in his grave? Apparently, instead of toughing out challenges, people are supposed to spend their lives whimpering to shrinks and getting appropriately drugged. At least prior to the current administration, the Food and Drug Administration has been a shill for Big Pharma and is unlikely to expose or admit the long-term harm from drugs that can partially numb minds.

Psychiatrists have helped some individuals better understand themselves and deal more deftly with everyday reality. But bogus mental illnesses have turned millions of healthy Americans into “mental patients,” according to Dr. Allen Frances.

But this peril also profoundly endangers freedom. The profusion of new diagnostic labels encourages people to view themselves as psychologically fragile. Actually, the Americans with Disabilities Act rewards people who demand “reasonable accommodations” (extra time for tests, no deadlines, etc.) because they are depressed or anxious. Those incentives create a downward politico-psychological spiral.

Kennedy’s commission will report to Trump within 100 days on the “potential over-utilization of medication” and other unrecognized health perils in America. Hopefully, the commission will deliver a stunning, well-documented report that will help people recognize how psychiatrists have concocted labels that have left millions of Americans at their mercy. 

About the Author

James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of ten books, including Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.