SHOTS HEALTH NEWS – Psychiatrists have joined other public health groups in calling for the removal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary.
Two psychiatry organizations — the Southern California Psychiatry Society and the recently formed grassroots Committee to Protect Public Mental Health — have released statements saying that the actions of the leader of the Department of Health and Human Services have increased stigma, instilled fear and hurt access to mental health and addiction care.
“As physicians committed to evidence-based care, we are alarmed by the direction of HHS under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr,” the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health said in a statement.
HHS responds
“Secretary Kennedy remains firmly committed to delivering on President Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again by dismantling the failed status quo, restoring public trust in health institutions, and ensuring the transparency, accountability, and decision-making power the American people voted for,” Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the federal health department, wrote to NPR in an email.
The Southern California Psychiatry Society represents more than a 1,000 clinicians; the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health has just over 50 members.
In recent years, the federal government had taken a leading role in funding efforts to address serious mental illness and substance use through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administrations (SAMHSA), notes Dr. Steven Sharfstein, a past-president of the American Psychiatric Association and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.
Those efforts had started to pay off, he adds.
“There’s been great progress in reducing the number of overdose deaths in the country as a result of these initiatives,” he says.
But the firing of staff at SAMHSA earlier this year, and the Health Secretary’s efforts to shutter the agency, have hurt those efforts, says Sharfstein, who’s also a founding member of the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health …
