Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went through heroin withdrawal more than 100 times during 14 years of addiction. He says getting off antidepressants is worse. On Monday, the US Health and Human Services secretary used that claim to justify a new federal action plan aimed at curbing the prescribing of the most widely used psychiatric medications in the country.

The “MAHA Action Plan,” announced at a May 4 summit on mental health and overmedicalization in Washington, directs multiple HHS agencies to evaluate psychiatric prescribing patterns, promote non-medication treatments, and train clinicians on how to taper patients off their medications. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also released new billing guidance — allowing doctors to be paid for deprescribing work for the first time.

Kennedy was careful to include a caveat at the summit: “If you are taking psychiatric medication, we’re not telling you to stop.” But his justification for the plan has alarmed the researchers and clinicians who actually study these drugs.

The Heroin Claim

Kennedy has repeatedly claimed that quitting antidepressants — specifically the class known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs — is as difficult or harder than quitting heroin.

“I’ve watched people come off of SSRIs and it is, it’s not even comparable,” Kennedy said at Monday’s event, referring to his own experience with heroin withdrawal. He described a family member who became suicidal after discontinuing SSRIs following two years of use. He made a similar claim at his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025.

Addiction researchers have pushed back firmly. Keith Humphreys, who studies addiction at Stanford University, told NPR that antidepressants and heroin “are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk.”

“In my 35 years in the addiction field, I’ve met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids,” Humphreys said.

A study published in the Lancet found that significant withdrawal symptoms affect roughly 1 in 35 people who stop taking antidepressants. Symptoms typically begin within five days of stopping and last one to two weeks, and are usually mild, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians and the UK’s National Health Service. A small subset of patients — one study pegged it at 2% of those who experience discontinuation symptoms — report lasting effects for three or more years.

Psychiatric nurse practitioner Sean Leonard, who specializes in addiction medicine, told USA Today that comparing the two drug classes conflates fundamentally different neurobiology. “Serotonin receptor sites versus the opiate receptor sites is night and day,” he said. “It’s so hard to come off an opiate. Your brain craves it, your body craves it; serotonin, not so much.”

What the Plan Actually Does

The HHS action plan involves three tracks: education and outreach, program and policy changes, and research-to-practice initiatives.

SAMHSA will publish a report this month on prescribing trends and host webinars through June and July for prescribers on side effects, deprescribing approaches, and evidence-based alternatives such as psychotherapy, nutrition, and exercise. In July, HHS will convene a technical expert panel — including health professionals, patients, and professional societies — to develop formal clinical guidance on appropriate psychiatric medication use and tapering.

CMS’s new guidance directs clinicians to established deprescribing resources, including professional society guidelines and FDA taper schedules.

Some of this aligns with what the psychiatric community has been calling for. The American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology published its own guidelines on discontinuation in February. And no serious clinician argues against informed consent or careful medication review.

The Stakes

The concern among psychiatrists is less about the policy specifics and more about the framing — and the messenger.

Kennedy has a track record of evidence-free claims about SSRIs: that they cause mass shootings, that they make people violent, that “every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence.” He has suggested some children should instead be “reparented” on farms.

Against that backdrop, the American Psychiatric Association welcomed the investment in research and training but objected to the overall framing. “We do have an issue with the framing of mental health as a primary problem of overmedicalization,” APA president Dr. Theresa Miskimen Rivera told CNN. “This type of characterization really oversimplifies a very complex, larger issue.”

Several experts noted that the larger issue is access, not excess. Only about 40% of US adults and adolescents with depression receive counseling or therapy. Depression remains the leading cause of disability worldwide. US suicide rates rose 35% between 2000 and 2018. And about a third of adults with depression do not benefit from existing validated treatments.

“As with all areas of medicine, we should be concerned about both overprescribing and underprescribing,” said Dr. Jonathan Alpert, chair of psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center. “In some instances, antibiotics or diabetes medications are overprescribed. In many other instances, they can be lifesaving. So too with psychiatric medications.”

The FDA has deemed SSRIs generally safe and effective for depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other conditions. Roughly 11.4% of US adults take prescription medication for depression. What “curbing” looks like in practice — and whether the rhetoric surrounding the effort discourages people who need treatment from seeking it — is what psychiatrists are now watching for.

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