Being neurodiverse in America can be rough, to say the least. You are seen as strange at best, dangerous at worst. If you are not being maligned as lazy, you are being fetishized for the seemingly positive traits of your disorder. Then, of course, there’s the problem with the word disorder to begin with, since it implies something to be fundamentally wrong with your mind. But what if it’s society that’s wrong, and not you?

That is, in brief, the thesis statement of the anti-psychiatry movement. With roots in Foucault, the anti-psychiatry movement sees psychiatry as an instrument of societal hierarchy, with the mentally ill being the outsiders that the community must be protected from. To be completely honest, I have some sympathy for this movement. I’ve been involuntarily committed before; I’ve seen some of the worst the mental healthcare system has to offer, especially when paired with the blunt force of the state.

Like anti-psychiatry advocates, I also struggle with seeing myself as “disordered”. My ADHD isn’t something that is wrong with me; it’s fundamental to who I am, something I was born with. Many on the autistic spectrum see themselves as not disordered, but simply different; this is where the term neurodiversity comes from. It’s the idea that, instead of being disorders, different neurochemical brain structures are simply different; like being left or right handed, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Unfortunately, I am constantly reminded that as far as this society is concerned, I do have a functional impairment. As proud as I am to be ADHD, I still forget about important tasks and chores I have to do, only remembering as midnight rapidly approaches and my bed calls to me. I still believe that ADHD isn’t inherently disordered, mind, but the world we live in right now makes it so. Without my Concerta, I would not be able to get anything done. This paradox is one I continue to struggle with; I do not think anything is wrong with my brain, and yet, I take medicine to make my brain work.

This contradiction is something I’m sure many of the mentally ill struggle with. It especially gets tricky when you have conditions that definitely are bad for you. As much as I am comfortable with being ADHD, I would certainly be better off if I didn’t also have my OCD and major depressive disorder. So, while the psychiatric system is flawed, we work with what we have.

Of course, we should all strive to improve the conditions of the mentally ill in America. Unfortunately, those who would advocate for us often seek to completely rip away what precious little support we have. I recently discovered a website called Mad in America. It’s a magazine where advocates of anti-psychiatry and Mad pride can write editorials. The website is ran by journalist Robert Whitaker, who wrote a book of the same name.

I have not read his book. From what I can tell, however, his work has been generally positive. He calls for re-evaluating how we treat schizophrenia, and criticizes the practice of forcing medication onto patients. He also, however, seems to be against anti-psychotics in general. Still, I can read the opinions of someone who I disagree with and gain valuable insight. As long as we’re all on the same page, right? So I followed the website, read some of the articles. I disagreed with how SSRI critical it could be at times (more on that later), but I found the website to be something different from what I was used to.

Then, they published the article RFK Jr. May Be Wrong on Many Medical Issues, But He’s Right About Antidepressants, written by Edward L. Jones III . An article which praises Robert Kennedy (RFK Jr)’s stance on SSRIs; that is, to ultimately ban them. I was stunned. A website which claimed to speak for the maligned, to stand up for the mentally ill, was endorsing perhaps the single greatest threat to the mentally ill in America.

Before I analyze this article, I want to provide some background. For those who do not know, RFK Jr is the son of Robert F Kennedy Sr. (commonly called Bobby Kenedy), a Democrat who was assassinated in 1968. RFK Jr is, or more accurately was, an environmental lawyer, holding corporations to task for their abuses of the environment. At some point, he was exposed to anti-vaccination and anti-pharmaceutical ideas, and has since become an icon for the movement. He’s also the new head of the department of Health and Human Services, working for the fascist Trump regime.

I want to say unequivocally that RFK Jr is a threat to my life. He is not simply asking questions about the efficacy and side effects of SSRIs, nor is he simply misinformed. He is outright malicious. He advocates sending those ‘addicted’ to ADHD medication and SSRIs to so-called wellness farms, where they will work and pick organic fruit to become cured of not only their medication dependencies, but also of their underlying mental illnesses. Despite the benign name, we have a word for places you send undesirables against their will. Prisons.

Mad in America, a publication which has criticized involuntary commitment, is now advocating for a man who wants to lock away the mentally ill on essentially forced labor concentration camps. How does this happen? Is it suddenly “not as bad” because it’s outdoors? Or do they take the word wellness farm at face value?

Let’s take a deep breath, before we get too angry, and read what this article has to say. It’s a short article, so let’s go line by line.

Ever since Robert F Kennedy Jr. was nominated to be President Donald Trump’s Secretary of HHS (Department of Health & Human Services), Mr. Kennedy’s past views on a number of health-related issues have been met with justifiable skepticism.

On several of these issues, Mr. Kennedy may be wrong. But on one important health-related subject, RFK Jr. has been consistently right: the potential link between SSRI antidepressants and mass school shootings.

At first glance, this seems like a strong start. A condemnation of the misinformation RFK Jr spreads about medication. However, even here the insipid defense of RFK’s ableism (yes, ableism). He may be wrong. The article does not say he is unequivocally wrong, only that he might be. Juxtaposed next to him being right about SSRIs, it invites the reader to question what they know. If RFK is right about SSRIs, what else is he right about? This sort of writing is not neutral. It’s leading, it’s persuasive. This article is an opinion piece, and so it is entitled to have its biases; I certainly have mine. But it claims to not support RFK in his totality, only to give the game away here. This is not mere opinion; it’s pro-RFK propaganda.

The article goes on to detail the public questioning that RFK Jr received at his confirmation hearings, where he was questioned on misinformation he has spread about SSRIs. You can read the article for yourself if you wish to see for yourself; but it is largely only establishing background facts on Kennedy’s confirmation.

I share Erin Burnett and Dr. Gupta’s skepticism about Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s veracity on a number of health-related subjects. However, on the specific subject of SSRI antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil, and their link to school (and other) shootings, RFK Jr. has a point. Indeed, there are numerous documented cases that show a link between SSRIs and school violence. Following are just three examples.

The infamous link between SSRIs and school shootings, something you hear echoed by the antidepressant-skeptical. So is there any efficacy to this correlation? Certainly, SSRIs in particular can have negative side effects. They build dependency; without mine, I get brain zaps that make it very hard to focus. For some people, they outright do not work, and there are a host of negative health effects that can follow. Which, to be clear, is the case with all medication, not just psychiatric medicine.

There is one study that I could find about the connection between violence and SSRIs. Keeping in mind that I am not a scientist, the data seems to suggest that SSRIs can lead to increased aggression. However, increased rates of violent crime only increased in those who had previous convictions before beginning SSRIs. Different disorders also led to different increases of violence, with a lot of confounding variables making a simple analysis difficult. Regardless, the study concluded:

In conclusion, this nationally representative study found that there may be an increased hazard of violent crime during SSRI medication in a small group of patients; that it may exist across age groups and throughout treatment periods; and that it possibly persists for up to twelve weeks after treatment discontinuation. While further research is called for to illuminate questions of causality and risk prediction, our results suggest the need for clinical awareness of the risk for severe violence during and possibly after SSRI treatment across age groups, and provision of information to high-risk individuals. However, a large majority of SSRI-users will not experience the outcome of violent crime, and our results should be understood in this context. Associations between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and violent crime

In essence, more research needs to be done, but only a small handful of individuals taking SSRIs will commit violent crimes. Most school shooters have a wide variety of factors that go into their decision to commit such a horrible crime. These range from ideological ones (often white nationalist) to mental health related issues (untreated severe depression) to an abusive home life. In fact, I’d argue an abusive or absent family is the single biggest risk factor for a school shooting.

Regardless, the article goes on to detail how the Columbine shooters, Red Lake shooter and Tuusula shooter were all on SSRIs. The author goes on to blame SSRIs as the cause for the particularly horrific Sandy Hook massacre; in all of these cases, the author implies a special insight into their mental health, claiming that these teenagers were otherwise happy or normal before being prescribed anti-depressants. This is obviously fallacious; you don’t get prescribed anti-depressants on accident. Mind you, misdiagnoses happen, but very rarely if there’s absolutely nothing there at all.

At the conclusion, the author levels an accusation of conspiracy at the healthcare industry.

So how could so many otherwise well-informed people be so misinformed on this important subject? I believe that I know the answer.

For decades, pharmaceutical behemoths like Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline—the makers of Prozac and Paxil, respectively—have successfully suppressed mountains of clinical trial data that establish a link between SSRI antidepressants and suicidal and homicidal ideations and, in rare cases, murder and mayhem. And early on, the FDA was duplicitous in burying these negative clinical trial results.

It is high time that more politicians, journalists, health officials, physicians, psychiatrists, and patients were made aware of this potentially lifesaving information.

Certainly, the pharmaceutical industry has blood on its hands. But this implies an active suppression of scientific research – despite the fact that the very research being referred to is available to the public. The reason such research has not led to the banning of SSRIs is twofold. First, there are too many confounding variables to conclude SSRIs are responsible for violent crimes (existing mental health conditions in particular), and second, it’s because SSRIs work.

SSRIs do not only treat depression; they treat OCD and a myriad of other anxiety conditions as well. My SSRIs have mitigated the worst of my obsessive thought patterns. Before SSRIs, I would regularly obsess over gruesome and obscene imagined situations in my head. I would act out compulsions, such as snorting, opening and closing doors, or even spending hours researching if I was bad person for having those thoughts in order to banish those obsessions.

SSRIs did not cure me. I still have these obsessive thought patterns. But it is a marked improvement. The thoughts are less common. The compulsions are easier to resist. I can go outside without having a panic attack – something that was incredibly difficult for me before I was medicated. And, on the note of depression, I can actually get out of bed every morning and start my day thanks to my SSRIs – and thanks to my concerta, too.

Almost anyone else who is neurodiverse will tell similar stories. We may disagree on the efficacy of specific medications, but those of us who are medicated will tell you that RFK Jr can take our medications out of our cold, dead hands. This isn’t a threat; it’s a statement of reality. Without our medications, many of us would die. I might be included in that number, and this is a scary time for all of us.

Mad in America claims to speak for those of us who have been abused by the psychiatric system, for people like me who are skeptical of psychiatrists and mental health professionals. And yet, most of its articles seem to be written by neurotypicals who have never had to struggle with OCD, let alone a long-term mood disorder. Like every other media outlet that advocates for us, it is not by us, nor is it about us.

Foucault stated that the purpose of psychiatry was to other those that society found unpalatable, and to sequester them away from public view. It’s an analysis I have some agreement with. But the writers of Mad in America want the same thing. They claim our OCD, our personality disorders, our post-traumatic stress disorders, our autism come not from our lives or an accident of our births, but from the very medication we take to help us.

Only the mentally ill can speak up for the mentally ill. Only the neurodiverse can understand the neurodiverse. We do not need to be spoken for. We need to be understood. And this prevailing mindset among the (largely) neurotypical anti-psychiatry movement is proof that we cannot continue to allow neurotypicals to dominate the conversation.

If we do, RFK Jr will be the least of our concerns, and we’ll all be seeing each other at the organic farm concentration camp.