NY Times on "fears among psychiatrists"

Supposedly, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is mounting a push to rein in the use of depression medications. Ellen Barry reports from the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in San Francisco that thousands of psychiatrists gathering there are feeling a current of anxiety due to Kennedy's policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe SSRI's. The worry is that Kennedy's statements will convince people to refuse psychiatric medications.

Dr. Marketa Wills, the CEO of APA promised that her organization will be standing tall against "anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need."

That's easy until you question what she means by "care" and who defines what patients "need".  The only kinds of treatment psychiatrists have specialized in for a couple generations are drugs and shock. Presumably, drugs and shock are "care" whether people want them or not, and "need" is determined by any arbitrary DSM "diagnosis" that usually gets assigned after the fact of a chosen prescription anyway. 

So, if you couple that perspective with the fact that psychiatry is uniquely dependent upon coercion to maintain its status as a branch of medicine or any market for its services, RFK, Jr. might appear to APA types much as Frederick Douglass appeared to Southern slaveholders in the Nineteenth Century: he is threatening to abolish their way of life.

One interesting question will be whether APA can ever benefit from RFK's favor of psychedelic drugs. Psychiatrists apparently worry that Kennedy will work to generally discredit psychiatric "treatment"  (the currently approved drugs, ECT). Psychedelics were originally psychiatric drugs, and they may be again if a desperate last resort is required to maintain the guise of a medical specialty. Psychiatry was a post-World War II political tactic before it became "medical treatment" in the United States. Many members of RFK, Jr.'s extended family were closely connected to the history of LSD. 

Right now we all probably have to wonder which is tail, which is dog, and who's wagging whom....