In his first meeting with the staff, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said Tuesday that he intends to address the possible overexual of children and the risks of antidepressants, according to an employee who presents .
The promise echoed an executive order that President Donald Trump issued last week established by the Make America Healthy Again commission, which in charge of reducing chronic diseases, particularly among children. Trump turned Kennedy into the chair.
The commission agenda, according to the order, includes analyzing whether antidepressants are exhibited to children; Trump requested a report that evaluates “the prevalence and threat raised by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.”
Known as ISRS, this kind of antidepressants increases serotonin levels, a chemical messenger in the brain that can improve mood. Includes Lexapro, Prozac and Zoloft, which treat conditions such as depression, anxiety and compulsive obsessive disorder. Depending on the medical condition, some SSRIs are approved for children who start from 6 to 10 years, but adults who use them much more commonly are used than lower.
In recent years, Kennedy has criticized what he sees as an excessive use of these drugs, suggesting that they can be addictive and carry dangerous side effects.
“I know people, including my family members, who have spent much worse, leaving the SSIs that people who have heroin,” he said during his Senate confirmation audiences.
In the past, Kennedy has amplified the false claims that link the SSRs with school shootings. He kept in the recent audiences that he thinks a possible connection must be studied “, along with other possible guilty.” (A 2019 study found that most school shooters had not taken psychotropic medications, and when not “a direct or causal association was not found” with the shootings).
The doctors, however, say that the SSRIs are not addictive, and that even the most extreme side effect that the FDA warns, a risk of suicidal thoughts between children and adolescents, is only slightly high: 4% versus 2% among which which They take a placebo.
Now in a position to convert their beliefs into politics, Kennedy seems to be pushing the SSRIs in the National Attention Center, a movement supported by some conservatives who have adopted the “Maha” movement, make the United States again healthy.
“I have met many people who take antidepressants. In almost all cases, there are very obvious things in their lives that would make any normal person depressed, “wrote the right -wing podcaster and commentator Matt Walsh in X on Tuesday, and added:” Instead of making changes in style Of life or dealing with the underlying trauma, they are given drugs. “
The greatest attention in the SSRIs has led the mental health defense groups to speak in support of medicines. Drugs can save life by mitigating suicide thoughts, and can also help people with severe depression or anxiety daily and maintain social relationships.
“We are deeply concerned, some of these directives could create significant barriers for effective treatment for those who suffer from an obsessive compulsive disorder (TOC) and related conditions,” said the International TAT Foundation in a statement.
Senator Tina Smith, D-minn., Which challenged Kennedy during her confirmation audiences about her comments about the SSRIs, said in a statement: “Instead of letting this be a problem among Americans and their doctors, under this Executive order, Mr. Kennedy is planting the seeds to undermine the confidence of people in medicines that are tested, effective and, in some circumstances, save lives. “
In response to the questions about why the Maha Commission is investigating the SSRIs, the White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement that “Americans have lost confidence in the medical apparatus that disappointed us during the Covid Pandemia and supervised an unprecedented explosion in chronic diseases. ”
“The Trump-Vance administration will continue to review the current best practices and medical care agencies to implement the necessary reforms,” he added.
In children and adolescents, the SSRIs are generally reserved for cases that involve moderate or severe symptoms, such as those that are actively suicidal or whose depression prevents them from eating, sleeping, socializing or attending school.
The gold standard for severe depression is to use SSRs in combination with therapy, said Dr. Christine Crawford, associated medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Diseases, a non -profit group.
“If things are severe, then we will add the medication component, so that the child can function physically,” he said.
The use of SSRs among minors has increased significantly in recent years, a trend to which Kennedy referred during his audiences. A study last year found that the number of people aged 12 to 17 with an antidepressant recipe increased 43% from 2016 to 2022. (However, the study also found that young adults from 18 to 25 years old were more than double of the total number of recipes related to the youngest group.)
Dr. Kao-Ping Chua, author of the study and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Michigan, said that an explanation of the trend is that “the prevalence of anxiety and depression has increased among adolescents, young adults , even before.
“During the pandemic, there is ample evidence that suggests that the mental health of this group got worse,” he said.
Experts generally agree that it is important to discover why teenagers and young adults are experiencing depression and anxiety.
“There are many reasons why children can feel sad or anxious, including the experimentation of significant traumas, poverty, social difficulties in school, and I think that sometimes medications are given in those cases when a psychological intervention would be much more effective,” Said Dr. Michael Bloch, director of the Pediatric Depression Clinic at Yale Medicine Faculty.
The shortage of available or affordable therapists can also encourage people with softest symptoms to look for medications as first -line treatment. Bloch said adding more mental health services in schools could address that problem.
He added, however, that when it comes to antidepressants, “it is a fairly established science that has a use in many children with anxiety, TOC and depression.”
As for Kennedy’s claims about the risks of the SSRIs, doctors said that medications do not cause dependence, although if patients do not reduce the dose properly when they begin to stop taking them, they may experience withdrawal symptoms. That is also true for other types of medications, even for blood pressure and seizures.
And although the SSRIs can have side effects, such as nausea, headache and difficulty sleeping, Kennedy’s suggestion that could be linked to violence is also incorrect. Although antidepressants carry a warning about a potential risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children and adolescents, Kennedy falsely declared in their confirmation audiences that the warning referred to “homicidal behavior.”
Some doctors question whether the warning is necessary and worries that it has deterred people who need drugs to carry them.
However, there are important questions without an answer about antidepressants, doctors said. Bloch, which treats children with depression and TOC, said they do not have good data that compare higher doses versus lower of SSRS, or evaluate the risk of getting children out of a medicine.
And Crawford said that due to the many barriers to do clinical studies in children, “we tend to continue behind the adult population in terms of medicines that approve the FDA.”
