So here's an HHS Statement from 2024. You'll note it says "by doing this, we accomplish this." This is typical government boilerplate - "we did a thing for reasons."

RFK JR's statement is "things are bad, let's start a witch hunt." It implies nobody has ever studied childhood obesity, for example. It assumes by default that whatever level we're prescribing SSRI's, it's too much. It sets out a 100-day deadline to deliver a report card on the whole of the medical establishment. Thinking rationally here - how much could you investigate in 100 days? What would that investigation look like? And if you came into it with preconceived notions, would you even have time to question your assumptions?

Now - as we've discussed before, RFKJr did this shit in 2005. We had plenty of documentation saying that vaccines were fine and dandy in 2005. There had been a CDC database for fifteen years at that point. There has been an absolute sea of studies since. The scientific outlook is now as it was before, and yet we've been through 20 years of "teach the controversy."

You don't find any fault in it because you're studiously not looking for it. You believe that all this is on the up and up and you haven't evaluated it critically.

Populism works because people yearn for simplicity. Simplicity always takes some form of "who's to blame." "Americans are unhappy because they take too many SSRIs" is much simpler than "Americans take so many SSRIs because our medical system is intervention-based, funded through extremely flawed public and private policy and hobbled by capitalist self-interest and we legit have no other easy method for dealing with well-earned, organic depression." My wife has the legal authority to prescribe SSRIs. She never does. The thinking behind that is if you're going to be in the practice of reducing people's medication (as naturopathic medicine's basic philosophy requires her to do), you need to understand those medications well enough to understand the risks of reducing them. Do SSRIs take the place of lifestyle changes, better health practices and a general focus on improved well-being? Absolutely. But what's your alternative? Tell the newly-single mom with a history of abuse and a codependent mother-in-law who is also her baby-sitter that she needs to get more sleep, pick up a hobby and eat more fresh vegetables and see how she does. That woman needs therapy and support and whatever solutions she can fit into her life and those should be managed by professionals. We've got two clinicians who focus on mental health and we still refer out a lot. There's a lot more to it than "drugs are bad, mkay?" It's Panama all the way down.

I grew up Santa Fe-adjacent. Which meant a lot of weird shit, tbh. One of those weird-shit moments was when a friend ended up in a school play. My school? Arsenic & Old Lace, the Tempest, boring shit like that. His school? Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Rhinoceros is interesting because it's a fable about people casually watching their friends and relatives turn into stampeding beasts. Why? Because it's easy. Rhinoceros came out two years after Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is very much about people turning into Red Scare witch-hunters but done in such a way that the HUAC didn't notice because totalitarian culture boards are always very stupid. The thing about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though, is that it is quite obvious that becoming a pod person is bad. They're not human. They just got got. Turning into a rhinoceros? That's a seductive choice. It's much easier to be a rhinoceros than it is to be a person.

We all know you find no fault in Kennedy's HHS statement. I can speak only for myself, but I would invite you to look for it. I cannot challenge your beliefs, and your belief in RFK is clearly of vital importance to your self-regard. All I can do is point out that you're not debating, you're not conversing, you're proselytizing.

And you didn't used to.