On Thursday while testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was pressed to explain his past statements regarding the health of “black kids.”
“In a 2024 podcast interview,” said Representative Terri Sewell (D-AL), “you suggested that black children on ADHD medication should be re-parented.” She elaborated on Kennedy’s supposed assertion before pointing out his admission that he has no medical background, then asked whether he has ever “re-parented or parented a black child?”
The secretary became evasive, arguing, “I don’t even know what that phrase means, and I doubt that I said it.” When Sewell requested a yes or no answer, Kennedy asserted, “I'm not going to answer something that I didn't say.” The congresswoman then noted that he “absolutely did say it,” before he declared, “Well, I’d like to hear the recording.”
That recording exists, so here are Kennedy’s words from the 19Keys podcast run by Christian nationalist George Janko:
“Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented.”
This isn’t the first time Kennedy’s unfounded claims about antidepressants have landed him in hot water before Congress. During his confirmation hearing in January of last year, he drew criticism after arguing that heroin may be safer than SSRIs, saying, "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.”
At the time, Stanford addiction researcher Keith Humphreys rejected Kennedy’s assertion, saying, “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."
Then last November, Kennedy posted that the government was “finally confronting the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence.” The Health Secretary was referring to a belief held by some that such medications increase the risk of mass shootings and severe behavioral disorders, of which experts say there is no evidence.
To the contrary, as Harvard Medical School professor Stephen B. Soumerai and Sydney Pharmacy School professor Christine Y. Lu explained, research in fact shows that the reduction of access to antidepressants increases the likelihood of suicide, anxiety, and depression.
“It should be alarming to all of us,” they wrote in reference to Kennedy, “that the man with the loudest megaphone in health care — Kennedy — is using it in ways that study after study have shown to increase anxiety, decrease doctor visits for severe depression, and drive up suicides.”
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