The Deprescribing Movement Is Here

Commentary

I count myself fortunate to be witness to a collapsing paradigm of folly. The event was the Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit sponsored by the MAHA Institute and the Inner Compass Initiative, held in Washington on May 4, 2026. It was a full day of deep investigation into the problem of overprescription of psychiatric drugs—for all classes of people, but young people in particular.

The day ended with a short speech by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who told of his 14-year heroin addiction. He revealed how he has family members who trusted the experts and started taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of antidepressants wrongly called medicine. Their power to breed dependence, he explained, exceeds that of heroin by multiple times.

Those who try to leave them quickly are presented with symptoms that seem like the problem the drug was supposed to fix. Patients easily confuse the symptoms of withdrawal for relapse of the supposed disease, leading to an endless cycle that is incredibly difficult to break.

Patients are rarely, if ever, informed of these potential problems. They are usually told that they are sick, with what is popularly but wrongly called a “chemical imbalance,” and that these pills are there to fix the problem. Where is the physical evidence of this diagnosis? It does not exist. It comes from expert judgment garnered from interviews and observation.

When does one know when the problem is repaired? Is it ever? Is there an off-ramp? How does this work? What are the effects of this drug? How do we actually know for sure that this drug addresses the presented problem and how does this happen? What are the downsides?

These questions are all shelved, as the patient and parents are led to believe that all of this is scientifically proven as proper treatment.

As Kennedy pointed out, one in four adults are on some kind of psych drug, and one in 10 kids are. One-third of college students have taken these meds, sometimes to help with study discipline—but this experimentation can kick off an adulthood characterized by pharmaceutical dependence along with the draining away of vibrancy from life itself.

The prevalence data are never precise, and my every intuition suggests that all these numbers are an underestimate. During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period, telehealth was liberalized and anyone could get on a call with a psychiatrist—using company-provided health care—and find themselves on one of these drugs. Feeling sad? Pick up your prescription from the local pharmacy.

The No. 1 misnomer of these pills is that they are medicines to fix maladies. They are not. They are more correctly described as sedatives that mask normal human sadness, lethargy, indifference, anxiety, and alienation that will manifest themselves in symptoms such as insomnia and crippling fear. They mess with the most important organ in the body, the brain, in ways no one quite understands.

I’m now careful never to call these prescriptions “psych meds” and instead call them what they are: legal drugs, not different in kind from those that are interdicted at the border.

The remarkable day of this event began with a panel of young people in their 20s who had been put on psych drugs in their early teens and then followed a common trajectory toward more and stronger drugs. Each visit to the doctor ended in another prescription and each new drug introduced new complications, including, especially, lack of sexual function and tendency toward social detachment.

Any attempt to taper off is warned against by the presiding physicians as dangerous. When the symptoms are not alleviated, the patient is declared to be “treatment resistant” and new methods are considered, all the way up to the modern equivalent of shock treatments and chemical lobotomies.

Many of the people gathered in the room had already read Laura Delano’s book “Unshrunk,” the bible of the deprescribing movement. I’m a huge fan of this book, which, if it were not a precise and factual autobiography, would have made great fiction. It’s well-constructed as a literary form, with a life arc that takes the reader on a terrifying adventure. No one who has read it can come away with a sanguine view of this industry and its effect on people.

Crucially, Delano’s bravery in telling her story has inspired many more people to go public to protect others from the same fate.

The day progressed with testimony from doctors and psychiatrists who are effectively whistleblowers in their professions. They explained how the trials of these drugs work and the fake science behind covering up their side effects, and how the industry itself has captured the journals, the agencies, the medical insurance industry, and the media with nonstop advertising pitches that you see every evening on TV.

Late in the day came the regulators from the agencies: the National Institute of Mental Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the HHS. Many of these people had been sitting through the events of the day. Here is when I realized something remarkable. An entire medical paradigm had collapsed and a new one had emerged in real time. Every regulator spoke about the urgent need not to prescribe but to warn, taper, and deprescribe. In one day, the topic of psych drugs had flipped: The answer had become the problem and the new answer became how to end this epidemic of drug use.

It was a remarkable thing to behold. Riveting, actually.

The same day, agencies in the federal government issued a “Dear Colleagues” letter that urged other solutions besides drugs: “HHS encourages states, tribes, territories, health systems, payers, clinicians, and community-based providers to review current policies, workflows, training, and referral pathways to ensure that evidence-based non-pharmacological options are available and that medication management practices reflect shared decision-making, informed consent, and appropriate clinical review.

“Treatment should be individualized. Alternatives should be discussed. Medication regimens should be reassessed over time, and, when tapering or deprescribing is clinically appropriate, it should occur in a safe, thoughtful, and collaborative manner.”

Kennedy finished out the day with big announcements.

“Today, we take clear and decisive action to confront our nation’s mental health crisis by addressing the overuse of psychiatric medications—especially among children,” Kennedy said. “We will support patient autonomy, require informed consent and shared decision-making, and shift the standard of care toward prevention, transparency, and a more holistic approach to mental health.”

He laid out a new list of priorities: reduce unnecessary dependence on medication, improve patient outcomes, and return control to the patients. He even addressed billing practices with a plan to reward doctors for getting patients off the drugs rather than putting them on with nonstop escalation.

This entire industry is relatively modern. It was Valium in the 1960s, Prozac in the 1980s, and then there was an explosion of drugs in the 1990s and following, including Zoloft, Lexapro, Lithium, Adderall, and more. None are tested in the long term for effectiveness and none are issued with a path toward leaving them behind. They are drugs, and profits, for life.

The founders of modern psychiatry would be mortified to see what it has become. Sigmund Freud founded the science specifically as an alternative to physical invasion, poisonings, and moral shaming. His proposed interventions were distinctly nonpharmaceutical. That spirit has long been left behind in favor of magic pills that alter life experience itself.

No one in the United States today has been untouched by these drugs that are wrongly labeled medications. We’ve seen them hit children, spouses, friends, and coworkers. One wonders how much of a role they have played in large cultural shifts, from loss of drive and creativity to family breakups to school shootings. They breed a culture-wide attitude of “I don’t know, I don’t care, and life is pointless.”

The carnage is enormous. The need for tapering and deprescribing is urgent.

The event in Washington that I attended inspires tremendous optimism that change can happen. It starts at the top, and it will take time before the industry as a whole shifts. But one can observe this happening. And if it can happen here, it can happen to more classes of pharmaceuticals as well.

The activists who have inspired this change deserve great credit and celebration.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.