The Trump administration is moving to discourage antidepressant prescribing, with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiling a federal strategy this week to reduce what he calls psychiatric overmedicalization in the US.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to "curb psychiatric overprescribing" and promote what officials call "deprescribing when clinically indicated." Kennedy, who has long criticized selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and previously claimed without evidence they drive school shootings, framed the effort as rebalancing treatment priorities. "We will no longer treat them as the default," Kennedy said at a Monday event hosted by the Make America Healthy Again Institute. "We will treat them as one option, to be used when appropriate, with full transparency and with a clear path off when they are no longer needed."
A Monday letter from HHS officials to mental health providers lays out the administration's expectations. The guidance emphasizes non-medication approaches including psychotherapy, diet, physical activity and social connection. It also clarifies that clinicians can bill for deprescribing services and provides resources for managing the process safely. Kennedy stated the action plan specifically targets "overuse" among children and adults alike.
The move faces significant resistance from the psychiatry establishment. The American Psychiatric Association, representing over 40,000 physicians, said the administration misdiagnoses the actual crisis. The group welcomes investment in research and clinician training but rejects the premise that overprescribing is the problem. "That characterization oversimplifies a complex crisis and ignores the larger reality," the association said in a statement, pointing instead to gaps in patient access, workforce shortages, limited psychiatric beds and uneven care distribution across the health system.
A 2025 survey across all 50 states found nearly 17% of respondents currently take antidepressants. The same survey showed a majority of adults oppose restricting access to these medications. The psychiatric association argues that deprescribing, while sometimes appropriate, cannot alone address systemic failures in mental health care. "The solution is not to stigmatize psychiatric medication or impose broad assumptions on clinical care," it said, "but to ensure that patients have access to the full range of evidence-based treatments."
Kennedy told providers and patients not to stop their medications: "If you are taking psychiatric medication, we are not telling you to stop. We are making sure you, and your clinician, have the information and support to make the right decision for you." The administration plans to support training programs for both prescribing and deprescribing decisions guided by individual patient needs.
Author James Rodriguez: "Kennedy's framing swaps the real access crisis for a phantom overprescribing epidemic that most psychiatrists say doesn't match clinical reality."
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