The irony of RFK Jr’s PR campaign against psych meds is that he’s only further entrenching psychiatric power and profits, increasing specialty reimbursement and elevating psychiatric claims to expertise by undercutting PCPs’ role in the vast majority antidepressant scripts.

There are major problems in antidepressant prescribing norms among PCPs, NPs, and psychiatrists. But RFK Jr’s moves do nothing to actually address them. What he is doing, as he’s done from day 1 at HHS, is simply undermining access to mental healthcare for poor and disabled people.

Ongoing simplistic debates about antidepressants — now intensified by RFK Jr and his allies to fuel their profiteering wellness schemes — obscure the complex dynamics of how psychic pain is understood and treated. undark.org/2025/08/21/o...

It's true that RFK Jr is not actually "anti-psychiatry." The fact is that he's a staunch advocate of "bringing back the asylums" and various other forms of psychiatric coercion targeting poor, disabled, and non-white people. He just doesn't believe in public care systems.

If you want to reduce reliance on psychiatry and reduce the field's power, as I do, then ensure people are provided necessary social care, basic income, and housing support. Simply cutting one of the few remaining forms of public care available to poor people is not going to demedicalize anything.

The debate around psychiatric medications is depressing. One camp blames them for all that's wrong in the universe, and the other insists they are the only reason life is livable. These extremes are mutually reinforcing, and both deflect attention from redress of actual root causes of suffering.

Psychiatrists generally believe what they say. I'd guess that 90% of US psychiatrists, at least those under 50 years of age, have taken or are currently taking an SSRI. The idea that they are prescribing them to patients while knowing them to be ineffective and harmful doesn't track with reality.

Imagine if people actually organized to address the root issues behind the over-reliance on SSRIs – and psychiatric medications of all classes – rather than rallying around health fascists like RFK Jr to lend their weight to the further decimation of public care systems. undark.org/2025/08/21/o...

Notable that "patient choice" around SSRIs is the supposed new mantra of the same group of people who are advocating for "the return of the asylums," rounding up unhoused people to send them to forced 'treatment' facilities, and expanding carceral and policing systems.

It's unimaginable that RFK Jr would oppose profiteering in the wellness industry or psychiatric coercion under the mental health-social work-policing-prison industrial complex, but celebrity representatives of psychiatric survivors celebrate him as an ally? Crude opportunists.

One of the ironies of criticisms of the overprescribing of psychiatric meds and associated medicalization is that it is the field of psychiatry that will benefit from it most, as diagnosis and prescribing––now mostly done by PCPs––will be reconsolidated under psychiatric control.

It’s telling of the class position of the present anti-psychiatry turn that its fixation is particularly on SSRIs and not on the far greater risk of harm associated with antipsychotics. For poor people on antipsychotics, RFK Jr just wants more forced meds and incarceration.

Translating anger at the perverse effects of the psychiatrization of society into alignment with an agenda to further weaken and destroy care systems is the problem – not the very legitimate anger at the psychiatric industry itself.

Withdrawing access to care is not demedicalization; it intensifies medicalization. The only route to demedicalization is to expand public services and guarantee universal access to both medical and social care. Those backing RFK Jr are intensifying preventable suffering, disability, and death.

Amazing how so many public figures who claim to speak in the name of psychiatric survivors are aligning themselves with RFK Jr's agenda, which explicitly includes expanding psychiatric coercion and bringing back the asylums. The disavowed racialized class divide at play is profoundly violent.

People aligning themselves with RFK Jr in the supposed name of improving care are willfully ignoring that his very clearly manifest agenda is to demolish public care systems and intensify market fundamentalism and associated wellness profiteering. Deadly opportunism.

The root of widespread mental illness and suffering in the US is not psychiatric medications; it's a government that has abandoned its citizens to market fundamentalism, alienation, exploitation, and withdrawal of essential social care. RFK Jr's plan to cut psychiatric care doesn't fix that.

The only way to actually reverse overmedicalization is by ensuring people have free and full access to care, including medical AND non-medical social care. RFK Jr and his MAHA supporters are instead making use of "overmedicalization" to further strip poor and disabled people of care.

Contra RFK Jr, antidepressants are not the root problem – but neither are they the solution. And the media discourse around antidepressants, arguments for and against, and the focus on withdrawal at the expense of broader analysis is only deepening our disease. undark.org/2025/08/21/o...

Political myopia continues to define psychiatry. The profession imagines itself the most progressive of medical fields at the same time that it is, in both its affirmative and critical forms, the most fascistically inclined toward what Tosquelles called "concentrationism."

This comes after his campaigns to bar thousands from basic healthcare access, strip poor and disabled people of basic food and income support, and expand the prison system under the banner of "bringing back the asylums." This is health fascism, not demedicalization. thehill.com/policy/healt...

When it comes to health fascists like RFK Jr, it's very important that critics of abysmal psychiatric norms today recognize that the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. It's sobering to see how many are eagerly ignoring the violence he represents. newrepublic.com/article/1918...

Psychiatry—and critiques of it—can be an enormously powerful tool for either fascism or democracy. www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...

Trump and RFK Jr’s vision for mental health policy is to simply double down on yet more mass incarceration in place of support and addressing the root causes of distress: poverty, childhood abuse, homelessness, exploitation, and isolation. www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...

Right-wing actors in the UK and the US are aggressively co-opting legitimate critiques of overmedicalization to further privatize and destroy public care systems. Unscrupulous and myopic critics of psychiatry, eager for validation and attention, are abetting them. www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...

Yes, we must "listen to patients" and "psychiatric survivors." We must also refuse the common practice of only regarding rich, white, hyper-privileged people (often entrepreneurs) with access to media as relevant patient voices. You'd get a very different portrait of what people need if you do so.

Trump and RFK Jr's new MAHA report blames poor US health on antidepressants. They're correct that antidepressants can't fix what ails us, but they're using this to obscure and deepen the root problems: inequality and defunded public care systems. Don't fall for it. newrepublic.com/article/1918...

A foundation cares about workers, mutual aid, and cultivating a new culture around labor abuses and worker relationships by addressing conditions in the industry––hospitality––through which most young people enter into labor, should really fund The CHAAD Project. www.wbez.org/food-drink/2...

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, American cities declared a policing crisis. But as Eric Reinhart argues, the programs that cities rolled out in response were profoundly limited in scope.

It‘s striking to work with young people in analysis or therapy and to encounter how many of them—having formed in an era defined by Trump and bipartisan genocide—feel their very existence to be a painful protest while octogenarian Democrats publicly criticize their supposed political disinterest.

The Mayor knows that cutting library budgets is detrimental to quality of life. Why then has he proposed a cut in the preliminary budget? www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/18-n...

This new essay on an abolitionist concept of “safety socialism” as a governing philosophy with relevance far beyond Mamdani and New York went up yesterday (after some very helpful edits by The Nation’s editorial team). www.thenation.com/article/poli...

NYTimes-style liberals can only see opposition to Trump if it appears in the from of support for Democrats. Anything else—like mutual aid to resist ICE, anti-war and anti-genocide movements, socialist organizing, etc—they just dismiss, because it threatens them too.

Nev Jones––our era's most essential mental health researcher––and I published this essay yesterday, highlighting alarming moves by Mamdani. Ending psychiatric coercion and building abolitionist care systems is an ethical imperative; it's also what's most effective. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

This is an absolute scandal; the United States government is deliberately consolidating all deportation cases of an ethnic minority that the President has called "garbage" in front of a handpicked group of judges and with dramatically accelerated timeline. A lawsuit was filed yesterday against it.

He has also deported dozens of dissidents back to Iran, where they were likely executed.

"These are not signs of a democracy under threat," writes @eric-reinhart.com. "They are symptoms of one that eroded – if it ever existed – long ago." "Why, then, does American political discourse remain fixated on a catastrophe that always seems imminent but never quite arrives?"

Trump keeps giving Democratic Party leaders what they've long wanted (and themselves done): genocide in Palestine, repression of dissent and leftist ideas on campuses, further expansion of ICE and policing powers, and more imperial war, inequality, and tech-bro oligarchy.

On my friend Giuseppe's kidnapping by ICE and Chicago community response: Even as Democratic Party leaders retreat into caution, rhetoric, and procedural theater amid the rise of fascism, many ordinary Americans have stopped waiting. Across the country, including in my Chicago neighborhood, have

Mental health crisis training for police doesn't work. We need a civilian alternative. www.thecity.nyc/2026/03/09/c...

Yesterday, The Guardian published an essay I wrote for their Fighting Back series. Here is the longer original version, with a link near the end to donate to my friend Giuseppe's mutual-aid fund to fight his kidnapping by ICE and to continue his asylum case. ericreinhart.substack.com/p/america-is...

The NYTimes publishing an editorial condemning an illegal, manufactured war alongside a columnist lending support to that war, which has already massacred school children, is not a sign of healthy debate. It's a reflection of a newspaper with no guiding ethical principles or purpose.

Exactly. Not cowardice. Agreement.

Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war.

Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders. You will be safe here.

Foreign governments would do best to take a clear stand: We do not negotiate with a terrorist American government. Trump has does not negotiate actual deals. He bullies, bulldozes, and bombs while lying through his teeth. Nothing he says is reliable. His promises mean nothing.

Schumer must be removed from office.

please don't call this weakness or cowardice or whatever. schumer supports the war and wanted more cover than he got. that's why dwelling on process stuff is ultimately a dead end: because even if every form was filled out correctly, this would still be an abomination.

Does anyone think that these blatant wars of aggression against weaker states––with bombing of schools and slaughter of children––won't continue provoking asymmetric warfare (ie, "terrorism") that reprises for decades to come? Assholes and idiots run the US and Israel. They must be deposed.