Hours into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hearing with the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday to vote on his nomination for U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) accused him of spreading lies and misinformation, particularly when it comes to mental health care and antidepressants.
In 2024, Kennedy speculated that antidepressant use could explain the rise of school shootings, despite a lack of scientific evidence to support such claims.
“There’s no time in American history or human history that kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates,” Kennedy told the comedian Bill Maher on an episode of the podcast “Club Random With Bill Maher” in April 2024. “It happened, you know, it really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”
When Smith asked Kennedy if he stood by this scientifically-unfounded claim, he lacked a clear response. “It should be studied along with other potential culprits,” he said, adding, “I just want to have good science.”
But studies show no causation between antidepressant use and school shootings, and Smith added that “most school shooters were not even treated with antidepressants,” and among those who were, there was “no evidence of association.”
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Kennedy proceeded to compare serotonin uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a common type of antidepressant including Prozac, Zoloft and Lexapro, to a heroin addiction.
“Listen, I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than people have getting off heroin,” he told Smith. Kennedy was previously addicted to heroin.
But psychiatric nurse practitioner Sean Leonard, who focuses on addiction medicine, disagrees with any comparison between SSRIs and heroin.
“Serotonin receptor sites versus the opiate receptor sites is night and day,” Leonard says. “It’s so hard to come off an opiate. Your brain craves it, your body craves it; serotonin, not so much.”
And, antidepressants can be life-saving for people struggling with depression, OCD, anxiety and other mental health conditions; Smith herself opened up about her experience with depression and taking SSRIs, saying the issue was “personal for her.”
“These statements that you’ve made linking antidepressants to school shootings, they reinforce the stigma that people who experience mental health every day face every single day,” Smith added. “And I’m very concerned that this is another example of your record of sharing false and misleading information that actually really hurts people.”
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The problem with linking school shootings to medications
Dr. Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and the lead researcher of a 2022 study on mass murders, previously told USA TODAY there’s no evidence of a link between medication and shootings.
“SSRIs, and psych meds in general, are not responsible for mass shootings or violence in any way,” Girgis said in an email. “These psych meds have specific anti-violence properties.”
People with untreated serious mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence or self-inflict harm than be violent towards others.
“This is an appeal to ignorance… there’s no evidence proving that something is false, therefore it must be true,” Julie Sweetland, sociolinguist and senior advisor at the FrameWorks Institute said during a press conference on Wednesday. “But here he’s (RFK Jr.) mentioning a correlation in a way that suggests a causation, when that causal link has been studied and found not to be there.”
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How do SSRIs actually work?
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a class of antidepressants that treat depression and other mental health conditions by increasing levels of serotonin — a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood, appetite, sleep, memory, social behavior and libido — in the brain, according to Cleveland Clinic.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 8.3% of U.S. adults ages 18 or older had a major depressive episode in 2021; for those aged 18-25, this rate jumped to 18.6%. The monthly antidepressant dispensing rate for young people increased 66.3% from January 2016 to December 2022, according to a 2024 study in the journal Pediatrics.
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During Wednesday’s hearing, Smith asked Kennedy about his previous comments that Americans who take mental health medications are “addicts” and “need to be sent to wellness farms to recover.” Kennedy denied his past statements.
But in July, he referred to a broad group of people who take ADHD medication or SSRIs and people who are dependent on opioids and benzodiazepines as “addicts.”
He unveiled a plan to send people struggling with addiction to “wellness farms” in rural areas. On Wednesday, he clarified that these treatment programs should be available, but not forcibly attended.
Taking someone off of an SSRI is called the “withdrawal process,” Leonard says, but it’s “nothing to the extent like opiates.” People typically taper off their doses, and may experience headaches, tiredness and “a little” anxiety, he adds.
“People are made to feel inadequate or stigmatized because they’re on a particular medication,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said during a press conference on Wednesday. “It does require a clear explanation for the utilization of these messages and normalizing mental health so that people don’t see it as any different from hypertension or diabetes, or any other medication or any other disease.”
Contributing: Hannah Hundall
