Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made psychiatric medications a focus of his review of the country’s childhood chronic disease crisis, claiming they’ve been “insufficiently scrutinized” and are addictive.

Childhood psychiatrists insist the drugs, for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression, are nonaddictive and proven safe and say they are more concerned about young Americans unable to access psychiatric medications that could help.

Kennedy emphasized his skepticism of these medications during his Senate confirmation hearings.

“Fifteen percent of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication. Even higher percentages are on SSRIs and benzos. We are not just overmedicating our children, we are overmedicating our entire population,” Kennedy told the Senate Finance Committee.

The exact rate at which American youths are using ADHD medications is hard to ascertain. Kennedy may have been referring to the results of a Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey released in 2023 that found 15 percent of high school seniors reported using a stimulant or non-stimulant ADHD medication.

Kennedy told HHS staff in closed-door meeting last week about the plans for his Make America Healthy Again Commission.

“Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized,” he said, adding, “nothing is going to be off limits.” Among the factors he named were the childhood vaccine........

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