Is Psychiatry Making America Unhealthy?
Personal Perspective: The HHSA's new campaign against medication overuse.
Posted May 8, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
As expected, the US Health and Human Services Administration, led by Secretary Robert Kennedy, launched its “MAHA Action Plan to Curb Psychiatric Overprescribing” on May 4.
On one level, the message resonates with many initiatives that mental health professionals, including myself, have been doing for years. There have long been concerns that psychiatric medications can be used too soon before things like therapy , family interventions, and health promotion activities. There is also a need to help prescribing clinicians safely discontinue or “deprescribe” medications that don’t work or are no longer needed. Again, this is nothing new. I have been giving presentations on deprescribing since 2017, and I was hardly the first person to talk about this.
It was also nice to see in their attached “Dear Colleague” letter directed to folks like me with acknowledgements like “psychiatric medications can play an important and, at times, essential role in treatment.”
The problem is that embedded in this lovely message about balance and seeking good care and encouraging healthy lifestyles is the subtext that psychiatrists and psychiatric medications are really the problem rather than the solution. Evidence that the current HHS initiative is more interested in fighting the psychiatric community rather than working with them can be found in who was invited to their Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit and, perhaps more importantly, who wasn’t. One might logically think that if you truly wanted to improve the prescribing of psychiatric medications, then you might want to bring in folks from the two largest psychiatric professional groups in the country, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP). Sadly, neither were offered a seat at the table. Ironically, over 200 child and adolescent psychiatrists were literally just down the street from their summit on the same day, talking to their legislators about improving child mental health for an “Advocacy Day” organized by AACAP.
The other problem is the infomercial quality of the message and portrayal of these initiatives as something new that was actively ignored by prior administrations and mental health professionals in the past. This includes claims that, finally, we’ll have a system that:
The next day, the American Psychiatric Association issued a reply . It tried to strike a delicate balance between supporting the many components of this initiative that make sense and are in complete alignment with a lot of a quality improvement efforts in psychiatry already while also acknowledging the subtext and reframing that HHS is trying to pull off by blaming the very people who are on the front lines trying to help people rather than the many other factors that are known to drive worsening mental health and are currently getting worse (healthcare access, poverty, among others). Not to be outdone, AACAP issued a similarly worded reply on May 7, and it was adorable how HHS reposted highly selected parts of these statements on their website , as though these groups are totally on board with what was said.
Overall, then, this initiative, while hopefully leading to some improvements in care, represents another missed opportunity. Had HSS decided to initiate a campaign designed to make sure that “the right people get the right treatment,” which would include both individuals who get treatment they don’t really need and the many people who can’t get the treatment they do need, we likely would have seen a strong and united support across many community, professional, and advocacy groups. Why? Because the non-cherry-picked science clearly shows that both of these problems exist and are important . Instead, the exact people who have the most power to make the changes they are looking for are left out and put on the defensive, forcing the kind of measured and tactful responses we are now seeing.
I give credit to groups like the APA and AACAP for trying to take the high road and embrace the useful parts of this campaign while brushing off the little jabs and insults that HHS seems incapable of restraining. As mental health professionals, we should indeed work to maximize the use of non-pharmacological approaches to reduce symptoms and improve well-being. These efforts will be much more effective by making friends rather than enemies.
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David Rettew, M.D. , is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and faculty at the Oregon Health and Science University.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.