We’re just a few weeks into Trump’s second presidency and, in addition to signing dozens of executive orders that threaten the rights of millions of Americans, he’s made some pretty questionable nominations to his cabinet. As one of over 59 million people in this country living with a mental health condition, I’m most upset about his pick for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And in case you missed it, his nomination was just confirmed by the Senate.
RFK Jr. has made baseless claims about antidepressants (specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) that are not only misinformed—they’re dangerous. Left unchecked, his statements have the potential to shift public opinion about a type of life-changing medication that’s been safely prescribed since the 1980s. Having taken an SSRI for nine years, this genuinely terrifies me.
My freshman year of college, I started having pretty bad symptoms of depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I felt like I was wearing the opposite of rose-colored glasses: Everything around me suddenly seemed dark, negative, and hopeless. Whenever I was alone, I’d get these moments of panic where it felt like my throat was closing and I couldn’t breathe.
Luckily, I was able to start seeing a therapist, and with the coping strategies she taught me (and a lot of hard work), my mood started feeling more stable after a couple of months. But my OCD symptoms—particularly the disturbing intrusive thoughts I was having—were still there. (In case you don’t know, OCD has two components: obsessions and compulsions. The American Psychiatric Association defines obsessions as “unwanted, intrusive, recurrent, and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that cause distressing emotions such as anxiety, fear, or disgust.” Compulsions are repeated behaviors or mental rituals that you do to try to get rid of those distressing thoughts and feelings.)
OCD can show up in a ton of different ways. For me, it was mostly mental. I wasn’t obsessed with keeping my dorm room neat or washing my hands seven times when I walked in the door, like the stereotypes you’ve probably heard. Instead, my obsessions appeared as super-upsetting thoughts, like, What if I lose control and jump off my dorm’s roof? and What if I’m repressing something horrible from my childhood? Whenever I had one of these thoughts, my compulsion was to go back over my thoughts and memories and look for evidence that maybe I did secretly want to hurt myself or that there was something I’d been repressing. When I didn’t find anything, I’d feel better for a bit…until another distressing thought would creep in and the cycle would start all over again.
The thing about OCD is that it thrives on doubt, so the more you engage with obsessive thoughts, the stronger they become. It got to the point where I’d spend hours of my day fighting my thoughts and playing mental ping-pong in my head. There were many times when I skipped going out with friends. On a couple of occasions, I was even afraid to get out of bed in case I had one of these thoughts and decided to act on it. The obsessive thoughts and the anxiety that came with them started leaking into most areas of my life. No matter what I tried, they were too loud to ignore.
That’s when I decided to try an antidepressant—specifically an SSRI. They work by increasing the levels of serotonin in your brain, which can help with multiple mental health conditions including depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. Just like any medication, they’re not 100 percent effective for everyone, but getting prescribed an SSRI was a complete game changer for me.
After I started my antidepressant, I’d still get obsessive thoughts sometimes but not nearly as often. And when they did come up, they were a lot easier to manage. I was able to focus in class and follow conversations with my friends. In short, this medication allowed me to enjoy life again.
During his Senate confirmation hearing last month, RFK Jr. seemingly doubled down on a dangerous earlier claim he’d made about antidepressants: that the rise of school shootings in America is linked to the medication. “There’s no time in American history or human history that kids were going to shoot schools and shooting their classmates,” he’d previously said. “It really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.” When asked if he stood by that statement, he replied: “I said it should be studied along with other potential culprits.”
The thing is, it has been studied. A 2019 study published in Behavioral Sciences & the Law, which reviewed all publicly available info about school shooters from 2000 to 2017, reads, “It appears that most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications [including SSRIs]—and even when they were, no direct or causal association was found.” Psychologist Peter Langman, PhD, who wrote School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators, also researched the potential connection. He found that from a sample of 68 school shooters, only 8 were taking a psychiatric medication in the days leading up to their attacks.
At the confirmation hearing, Kennedy also said, “I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they have getting off of heroin.” This implication that antidepressants are more addictive and harder to stop taking than heroin is also largely baseless. According to a 2024 study published in The Lancet, about 1 in every 35 people who stop taking an antidepressant will experience severe withdrawal symptoms (about 0.028 percent). For most users, that small risk is worth the relief from debilitating mental health symptoms. Opioids like heroin, on the other hand, produce withdrawal symptoms in about 85 percent of users. There’s really no comparison to be made here.
If this kind of fearmongering and misinformation about antidepressants continues, it has the potential to do serious damage. SSRIs are usually the first-choice medication for depression and anxiety because they’ve proven to be safe and effective—plus, they have fewer side effects than most alternatives. Suggesting that antidepressants make people violent and that they’re more addictive than one of the most addictive drugs in the world, villainizes a lifesaving medication that’s used by about 13 percent of Americans. That seems hugely irresponsible coming from someone in charge of the U.S. public health system.
There are already so many barriers to accessing mental health treatment in our country. It takes a lot for most people to work up the courage to even ask about going on an antidepressant—and that’s if they can manage to get an appointment with a doctor who can prescribe one. Between stigma, lack of affordable care, and a shortage of resources, it’s estimated that more than half of people living with a mental illness in the United States don’t get help. And the consequences can be deadly: A 2022 study found that the majority of people who die by suicide have never seen a mental health professional.
Spreading misinformation about medications like SSRIs can make it even harder for people to get the treatment they need. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without my antidepressant, and I don’t want to find out.
Kara Cuzzone is a New York City-based writer, editor, and artist. She has over seven years of experience covering health, wellness, and shopping-related topics for sites including Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Byrdie, Wondermind, and PureWow.
