Kennedy’s views mortify the mainstream media. The Washington Post did a hefty piece portraying Kennedy’s commission as more dangerous than any drugs prescribed to children. To discover the absolute truth, the Post turned to the CEO of the American Psychiatric Association, who assured the Post that “psychiatric drugs can be very effective and generally are given to children carefully after front-line treatments such as talk therapy.”

Decades ago, who would have expected an apology for Adderall, Prozac, Zoloft, and similar drugs to sound like a pitch for Kellogg’s breakfast cereals? Prescription drug use is skyrocketing. Antidepressant prescriptions for young Americans aged 12 to 25 increased by 66% between 2016 and 2022.

The New York Times reported last year that many young people were left worse off thanks to “mental health interventions.” The Times showcased psychiatric “prevalence inflation” – a vast increase in reported mental illness among teenagers who are encouraged to view normal feelings as grave maladies requiring intervention. Oxford University psychologist Lucy Foulkes observed that school programs are “creating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional.”

Foulkes explained that “awareness efforts” spur young people “to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems.” Filing such complaints “leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms, because labeling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual’s self-concept and behavior in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling.”

Like a New Yorker cartoon from the 1950s, psychiatric diagnoses have become status symbols, propelled by snake oil “social-emotional learning” programs. University of Southern California clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe warns that mental illness labels have “become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique. That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.” Psychiatric labels can become a ball-and-chain that people drag behind them. Endless classroom presentations on mental health spur “co-rumination” – excessively talking about one’s problems – which evokes memories of first dates from hell.