Psychiatrists say RFK Jr.'s take on SSRIs is an 'oversimplification' of the problem

PRESS RELEASE, FBI PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICE: The Bureau wishes to confirm that RFK Jr.'s assertion that SSRIs are the problem is under active review, and all findings will be referred to Hillary Clinton for prosecution.

The part that should worry people is that he's Health Secretary while actively discouraging a huge chunk of the population from taking medication their doctors prescribed. That's not a policy disagreement, that's regulatory capture in reverse.

RFK Jr., when the person with the public megaphone turns a complex psychiatric problem into a tidy slogan, who pays the price, the patient or the talking point? The APA is right to say access to real care is the issue, not another purity test dressed up as medicine. J

The American Psychiatric Association's own 2025 workforce report puts the shortage at over 31,000 psychiatrists nationally. RFK Jr. isn't oversimplifying access barriers; he's substituting a culture-war take on medication for any engagement with the actual supply problem. You can be skeptical of overprescription AND acknowledge that most patients can't get a psychiatrist appointment in under three months. These are not in tension. He just isn't doing either.

yeah sure, "oversimplification" is one way to put it when the health secretary is telling people SSRIs are basically poison

Concordantly, the APA's access gap and Kennedy's SSRI skepticism are distinct problems, ergo collapsing them obscures both. NPR frames this as psychiatrists correcting a crank, which is accurate, but the shortage crisis is not exculpatory for the crank; it is a separate failure that predates him. The office he holds now has the power to worsen both conditions simultaneously, and that is the variable neither the APA statement nor this headline accounts for.