The summit was hosted by the MAHA Institute, a Washington think tank founded a year ago by the Make America Healthy Again movement and led in part by Tony Lyons, a book publisher who blames a combination of Tylenol and a vaccine he hasn’t specified for his daughter’s autism. MAHA’s anti-vax effort, among its loudest campaigns as President Trump took office for the second time, has been derided by scientists and dismissed by much of the public. (Though Kennedy has denied it, the White House has reportedly asked him to mute his anti-vax arguments for fear of damaging the president’s candidates in the midterm elections.)
The mission to reform psychiatry, though, may prove to have more broad appeal. According to a large study conducted in 2025, one in six U.S. adults are presently on an antidepressant, but doubts about these drugs have been growing. Kennedy’s campaign comes after years of steadily accumulating critiques of psychotropic drugs and condemnation of pharmaceutical industry influence. Research comparing medications with placebos has repeatedly called the benefits of S.S.R.I.s into question, and lately the side effects of these drugs, including the possibility of irreversible sexual dysfunction, have stirred a surge of attention.
For a range of reasons, antipsychotics are also problematic. Because they act as sedatives, they are often added to drug treatment for mood or attention deficit problems in young patients who aren’t psychotic — and these drugs can cause major weight gain, breast growth in boys and in some cases debilitating movement disorders. The opioid epidemic, meanwhile, has sensitized the public to the power of pharmaceutical companies to corrupt practitioners and create patient trust when skepticism might be wiser.
Around 1980, mainstream psychiatry adopted a medical model. A new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, U.S. psychiatry’s bible of diagnoses, published that year, enshrined the change. Ever since, troubles of the mind have been viewed mostly as physiological diseases of the brain, with treatments focused largely on pharmaceuticals.
The medical model was partly a reaction against psychiatry’s decades-long dominance by psychoanalysis and its offshoots. It was, too, an expression of hope in an early generation of medications. The discipline, meanwhile, was under attack in popular culture; the antipsychiatry movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” won five Oscars in 1976. The field wanted to be viewed as a true science.