After a recent mass shooting (and how depressing is it that a few weeks later I can’t even remember which one?), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pointed out that the killer may have been taking antidepressants. Though a causal link between SSRI medications and gun violence is not at all supported by research, his implication landed with just enough confidence—just enough “no one else is talking about this” energy—that people started paying attention to it.
Honestly, I wasn’t surprised. RFK Jr. has never been especially friendly toward the mental health field (or to the health sciences more generally). He’s made plenty of sweeping statements about psychiatry before. What caught my attention this time, though, wasn’t the claim itself, but instead how quickly it started to blend in with language I’ve been seeing everywhere, including from people within my own echo chamber who don’t share his politics at all.
Broad skepticism toward health science is coming from all directions. It’s showing up on podcasts, in Instagram reels, in Substack newsletters with scientific-sounding names. There’s a version of this that looks pretty benign. Maybe it’s someone encouraging you to eat less processed food or to cut back on caffeine. Fair enough. But increasingly, the advice gets more dramatic. Sugar causes ADHD. Food dyes rewire your child’s brain. Anxiety is your vagus nerve misfiring. Your depression is gut-related.
Some of these claims borrow a tiny piece of emerging research and stretch it far beyond what the data supports. Others are completely unsubstantiated. It’s the appearance of science without rigor.
And the result is confusion and distrust. People are led simultaneously to feel sicker than they are and to believe that professional support is suspect. They are told to focus on things like food dye and cortisol levels, rather than things like chronic stress, family systems, social isolation, or access to actual health services.
As both a clinician and a researcher, this really bothers me. Truthfully, people are right to feel let down by parts of the system. Some were misdiagnosed. Some were ignored. Some were handed medication without a real conversation. These are valid complaints. But instead of moving toward better care, a growing number of people are abandoning the idea of care altogether—at least the kind grounded in research, community, and some version of shared accountability.
So while I’m not suggesting everyone should blindly “follow the science,” I do think we need to tone down this reflexive skepticism and move past the illusion that a few hours of “doing our own research” can substitute for actual expertise. We need to rebuild some basic trust in professional organizations and institutions, not because they’re infallible, but because they represent our best effort to separate signal from noise. And we need to remember that rejecting imperfect care doesn’t mean we’ve found better care. It’s quite possible to demand that the system work better without walking away from it entirely.
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