Is RFK Jr. actually banning SSRIs? Here's what Floridians taking antidepressants need to know
President Donald Trump issued an executive order last week to establish the "Make America Healthy Again Commission" to target chronic diseases, especially mental illnesses.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will chair the committee. The order outlines ways they plan to combat chronic illness, including education on healthy lifestyles and the effects of new technological habits.
The order also highlights statistics regarding America's high chronic disease percentage and lower life expectancy compared to other countries.
"To fully address the growing health crisis in America, we must re-direct our national focus, in the public and private sectors, toward understanding and drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease," the order states. " … We must restore the integrity of the scientific process by protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data. We must ensure our healthcare system promotes health rather than just managing disease."
Some of the commission's goals involve targeting mental health and the use of antidepressants. Here's what to know.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, also called SSRIs, are one of the most prescribed antidepressants. They can treat symptoms of depression and other conditions, such as generalized anxiety.
The Mayo Clinic explains how SSRIs work, noting that serotonin is one of many chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters, which carry signals between nerve cells in the brain.
"After carrying a signal between brain cells, serotonin usually is taken back into those cells, a process called reuptake. But SSRIs block this process," the clinic writes. "Blocking reuptake makes more serotonin available to help pass messages between brain cells. SSRIs are called selective because they mainly affect serotonin, not other neurotransmitters."
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved these SSRIs to treat depression:
Citalopram (Celexa)
Escitalopram (Lexapro)
Fluoxetine (Prozac)
Paroxetine (Paxil)
Sertraline (Zoloft)
SSRIs are a specific type of antidepressant.
Antidepressants are common prescription medications that can help treat depression and other conditions, such as anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 8.3% of U.S. adults ages 18 or older had a major depressive episode in 2021; for those aged 18-25, this rate jumped to 18.6%. The monthly antidepressant dispensing rate for young people increased 66.3% from January 2016 to December 2022, according to a 2024 study in the journal Pediatrics.
Several types of antidepressants target specific neurotransmitters, including:
Serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
Serotonin-noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)
Norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitors (NDRIs)
Tricyclic and tetracyclic antidepressants (TCAs)
Serotonin antagonists and reuptake inhibitors (SARIs)
Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs)
As of now, no. The executive order says it will address the possible overmedication of children and the risks of antidepressants.
One of the commission's goals is to "assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs."
According to NBC News, some SSRIs are approved for children starting at ages 6 to 10 depending on their condition; however, they are far more commonly used by adults than minors.
Kennedy has been vocal about his distrust for antidepressants; however, many health experts claim he is spreading misinformation about their drugs' impacts.
In 2024, Kennedy speculated that antidepressant use could explain the rise of school shootings, despite a lack of scientific evidence to support such claims.
'There's no time in American history or human history that kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates,' Kennedy told the comedian Bill Maher on an episode of the podcast 'Club Random With Bill Maher' in April 2024. 'It happened, you know, it really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.'
When asked about this during a hearing with the Senate Finance Committee last month, he lacked a clear response on whether he stood by his claims. 'It should be studied along with other potential culprits,' he said, adding, 'I just want to have good science.'
Kennedy also compared serotonin uptake inhibitors SSRIs to heroin addiction.
'Listen, I know people, including members of my family, who've had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than people have getting off heroin,' he said.
USA TODAY interviewed psychiatric nurse practitioner Sean Leonard who disagreed with any comparison between SSRIs and heroin.
'Serotonin receptor sites versus the opiate receptor sites is night and day,' Leonard says. 'It's so hard to come off an opiate. Your brain craves it, your body craves it; serotonin, not so much.'
USA TODAY contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Trump targets antidepressants in executive order. What to know
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The deadly drug that's complicating US-China trade
Since US President Donald Trump – just days into his second term – began imposing tariffs on China for its role in the flow of deadly opioids like fentanyl into the United States, Beijing's message has been clear. The fentanyl crisis is the 'US's problem,' Chinese officials have repeatedly said, and China has already done 'tremendous work' to address the issue. 'We stand ready for practical cooperation with the US based on equality and mutual respect. That said, we firmly oppose the US pressuring, threatening and blackmailing China under the pretext of the fentanyl issue,' a spokesperson said in March, after Trump's fentanyl tariffs were raised to 20% on all Chinese imports into the US. But as those tariffs remain in place months later and, despite a truce de-escalating other duties, Beijing is signaling it's paying attention to the issue – and may be prepared to do more. China late last month announced it will add two more fentanyl precursors to its list of controlled substances – an expected step that brought it in line with international regulations, which its diplomats presented as a mark of 'active participation' in global drug control. Days earlier, Chinese authorities also extended control over another class of drug known as nitazenes – powerful synthetic opioids raising alarm among global health officials. The same day, Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong told US Ambassador to China David Perdue that Beijing was open to strengthening 'practical cooperation' on drug control. The Trump administration blames China for 'sustaining' the influx into the US of fentanyl, a lab-made, synthetic opioid dozens of times more potent than heroin. Abuse of the drug and its analogues has fueled a drug overdose crisis in the US, killing tens of thousands of Americans annually, though those numbers saw a significant drop last year. In Beijing's view, it's gone above and beyond international norms to stem the outflow of the drug and its component chemicals from its vast pharmaceuticals sector. In 2019 Beijing controlled fentanyl as a drug class – a significant move that drastically reduced the flow of the finished drug directly from China to the US, according to experts and US officials. It didn't take long for criminal networks to adapt, however. Chinese outfits shifted to selling precursor chemicals often to cartel-backed labs in Mexico, which then make and ship illegal fentanyl and similar drugs to the US. Chinese authorities have since controlled a number of these precursor chemicals. But experts and US officials say more could be done – as Beijing remains the largest source for products used to make illegal fentanyl and other synthetic drugs in Mexico and other countries. Chinese officials haven't explicitly linked their recent efforts at controlling two more of these substances to relations with the US, instead calling them another example of the 'goodwill China has shown,' and continuing to reject the premise of the US tariffs. But Beijing is likely expecting it will get credit for the latest moves in trade negotiations with the US. The question, however, is whether the steps will move the needle for Washington – and whether the two sides will be able to cooperate on the issue if their overall relations remain rocky. 'If Washington does not publicly recognize Chinese steps and show responsiveness to Beijing's own concerns, then bilateral law enforcement cooperation likely will falter going forward,' said Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. As US-China ties have chafed on everything from technology to China's militarization of the South China Sea, few issues have appeared more personal to American leaders than China's role as a producer of the drugs and chemicals fueling an opioid crisis in the US. During his first term, Trump hailed Chinese leader Xi Jinping's 'wonderful humanitarian gesture' of designating fentanyl a controlled substance in China. Some six years later, however, Trump began his second term accusing China of 'actively sustaining and expanding the business of poisoning our citizens' – an accusation vehemently denied by China. That message also contrasts with assessments from the US Drug Enforcement Agency which, in an annual report released in May, said fentanyl purity declined throughout 2024, consistent with indications that fentanyl cooks in Mexico were having trouble obtaining key precursor chemicals. That was as some China-based suppliers were 'wary of supplying controlled precursors … demonstrating an awareness on their part that the Chinese government is controlling more fentanyl precursors,' it said. Beijing's latest moves to control the two additional fentanyl precursors and nitazenes are positive actions that could have an impact on illicit drug supply chains, experts say. But they are also 'clever maneuvering' from China, according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. A UN convention on illicit drugs added the two fentanyl precursors to its list of controlled substances last year, meaning signatory countries such as China must follow suit. China controlled a number of nitazenes in 2024 and the latest step, which expands those controls, was already in the works last fall, Felbab-Brown said. 'The Trump administration just reset the clock, did not recognize what China had already done and had committed to do, did not give China any credit for that. As a result, it also now is in a position where China can be promising to do exactly the same actions that it had promised to the Biden administration and use that as part of the bargaining,' Felbab-Brown said. A 'more effective posture' would have been to embrace China's efforts in 2024 and then ask it to fill in the 'substantial and impactful' holes in its drug control program, she added. Beijing has fiercely defended its record when it comes to controlling fentanyl and other synthetic drugs, releasing a 7,000-word white paper outlining its efforts in March, days after Trump imposed his second raft of fentanyl-linked tariffs. It has also balked at a Congressional report released last year accusing the ruling Chinese Communist Party of directly subsidizing the manufacture and export of illicit fentanyl materials and other synthetic narcotics through tax rebates. In China, where the Communist Party keeps a tight grip on all aspects of society, there's comparatively limited opioid abuse, according to official data – a situation Beijing uses to suggest the problem is about American appetite for the drug, not Chinese supply. That also means Chinese officials feel they've gone out of their way to work with Washington on a US domestic issue – efforts they see as being greeted first by a lack of American appreciation, and then by tariffs. Scientists in China on the front lines of identifying new precursors being used by criminal groups also point to reducing demand in the US as a key factor, given the challenges of controlling chemicals involved in synthesizing opioids. 'You really can't solve the fentanyl problem through control alone… the most fundamental issue is still reducing demand,' Hua Zhendong, deputy director of a drug analysis division at a counternarcotics laboratory under China's Ministry of Public Security, told CNN in an interview last September. He pointed to how some chemicals have widespread use in legitimate products, making them impractical to control, while chemicals used to make fentanyl can be easily adjusted to evade rules but still produce the product. 'It's always been like a cat-and-mouse game, because there could be thousands of potential substances for synthesizing fentanyl, we can't proactively control them all – we can only passively follow behind,' said Hua, whose lab was working regularly with US counterparts at the time of the interview to share information on emerging chemicals. Outside observers agree that US efforts to curb demand are critical for mitigating the opioid crisis. They note too that even if no chemicals came from China, fentanyl makers would look to other countries with large pharmaceuticals and chemicals industries, such as India. Des pite the challenges of enforcement in a vast sector where goods are often shipped in covert ways by busy air and sea routes, observers also say that more can be done in China. That includes tightening regulations to enable tougher punishments for people who sell controlled precursors to criminal groups or their middlemen unknowingly. Experts also say more could also be done to enforce existing regulations, especially in terms of how central government edicts are enforced by local authorities across China. 'Scheduling drugs and precursors that lead to the production of illegal drugs is one step of many needed in China,' said David Luckey, a senior international and defense researcher at RAND, a US-based think tank. 'I would suggest better still would be actually preventing Chinese companies from selling and distributing these harmful chemicals and drugs to criminal organizations in Mexico.' In addition to China, Trump placed tariffs on Mexico and Canada earlier this year, accusing them of not doing enough to curb migration and fentanyl trafficking, but carved out significant exemptions to those tariff rates. The US earlier this year designated Mexican cartels it alleges are involved in fentanyl trafficking as foreign terrorist organizations. 'China is a command economy with extreme control of its population – I think if the Chinese Communist Party didn't want Chinese companies doing this, the CCP could do more to stop it, and be more effective in stopping it,' Luckey said. An annual US State Department report on narcotics controls released in March described China's 'significant steps' working with the US last year to reduce precursor exports, which it said included cracking down on online platforms and companies selling them, making arrests, and adding 55 synthetic drugs and precursor chemicals to control lists. China's Ministry of Public Security last month said it had seized more than 1,400 tons of various precursor chemicals, and 151 related criminal cases were resolved in 2024. But authorities in China also acknowledge the scope of the problem, with a recent report noting that channels and means for smuggling chemicals out of the country 'were increasing' and 'constantly being updated,' creating 'greater challenges.' Beijing – which seeks to present itself as a responsible global player – has its own reasons for not wanting to be seen as an international purveyor of illicit drugs. But Chinese officials have long linked cooperation with the US on the issue to the health of the broader relationship. China cut off drug control cooperation completely in August 2022 in retaliation for then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. It then took a friendly summit between Xi and former US President Joe Biden in late 2023 to get collaboration back on track. This time around, China has bristled at the Trump administration's off-the-bat imposition of tariffs, saying it 'undermines' cooperation. The White House did not respond to a CNN request for comment on China's latest control steps. 'If the US truly wants to cooperate with China, it should face up to the objective facts, correct its wrongdoing, and seek dialogue with China,' a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said last month when asked whether those measures were done in cooperation with the US or at its behest. But Beijing is also keenly aware that the current tariffs are hitting at a time when China's economy has already been struggling with domestic challenges – and there's no certainty those duties couldn't rise again under Trump's capricious trade policy. 'Since the 20% tariff is specifically linked to cooperation on fentanyl, the Chinese might be hoping for a package deal that includes trade, counternarcotics, among other things,' said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington. 'The Chinese hope to remove the 20% tariff … (and are) eager to get President Trump to visit China this year, so they need to work out good progress,' she said.
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US aid cuts halt HIV vaccine research in South Africa, with global impact
But the $46 million from the U.S. for the project was disappearing, part of the dismantling of foreign aid by the world's biggest donor earlier this year as President Donald Trump announced a focus on priorities at home. Advertisement South Africa hit hard by aid cuts South Africa has been hit especially hard because of Trump's baseless claims about the targeting of the country's white Afrikaner minority. The country had been receiving about $400 million a year via USAID and the HIV-focused PEPFAR. Now that's gone. Glenda Grey, who heads the Brilliant program, said the African continent has been vital to the development of HIV medication, and the U.S. cuts threaten its capability to do such work in the future. Significant advances have included clinical trials for lenacapavir, the world's only twice-a-year shot to prevent HIV, recently approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. One study to show its efficacy involved young South Africans. 'We do the trials better, faster and cheaper than anywhere else in the world, and so without South Africa as part of these programs, the world, in my opinion, is much poorer,' Gray said. Advertisement She noted that during the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic, South Africa played a crucial role by testing the Johnson & Johnson and Novavax vaccines, and South African scientists' genomic surveillance led to the identification of an important variant. Labs empty and thousands are laid off A team of researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand has been part of the unit developing the HIV vaccines for the trials. Inside the Wits laboratory, technician Nozipho Mlotshwa was among the young people in white gowns working on samples, but she may soon be out of a job. Her position is grant-funded. She uses her salary to support her family and fund her studies in a country where youth unemployment hovers around 46%. 'It's very sad and devastating, honestly,' she said of the U.S. cuts and overall uncertainty. 'We'll also miss out collaborating with other scientists across the continent.' Professor Abdullah Ely leads the team of researchers. He said the work had promising results indicating that the vaccines were producing an immune response. But now that momentum, he said, has 'all kind of had to come to a halt.' The BRILLIANT program is scrambling to find money to save the project. The purchase of key equipment has stopped. South Africa's health department says about 100 researchers for that program and others related to HIV have been laid off. Funding for postdoctoral students involved in experiments for the projects is at risk. South Africa's government has estimated that universities and science councils could lose about $107 million in U.S. research funding over the next five years due to the aid cuts, which affect not only work on HIV but also tuberculosis — another disease with a high number of cases in the country. Advertisement Less money, and less data on what's affected South Africa's government has said it will be very difficult to find funding to replace the U.S. support. And now the number of HIV infections will grow. Medication is more difficult to obtain. At least 8,000 health workers in South Africa's HIV program have already been laid off, the government has said. Also gone are the data collectors who tracked patients and their care, as well as HIV counselors who could reach vulnerable patients in rural communities. For researchers, Universities South Africa, an umbrella body, has applied to the national treasury for over $110 million for projects at some of the largest schools. During a visit to South Africa in June, UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima was well aware of the stakes, and the lives at risk, as research and health care struggle in South Africa and across Africa at large. Other countries that were highly dependent on U.S. funding including Zambia, Nigeria, Burundi and Ivory Coast are already increasing their own resources, she said. 'But let's be clear, what they are putting down will not be funding in the same way that the American resources were funding,' Byanyima said. Associated Press writer Michelle Gumede in Johannesburg contributed to this report.
