The MAHA Mental Health Contradiction
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Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] Beyond the talking points that are sort of stigmatizing mental health drugs, all they're saying is that with your doctor, you should be discussing whether these are the right drugs for you, whether you need to come off the drugs, whether it would be good for you to come off the drugs. It's just they're in turn stigmatizing these drugs and being on them and the patients that use them. the rhetoric that's the top line is there's an overprescription of mental health medications and it's unnecessary and all of this stuff and in fact to reinforce that point if you want to play clip two this is how they talk about the experts and the New York Times and a lot of other outlets published a response from that saying that the experts disagreed with the secretary and we all know that whenever they say trust the experts they're they got
[01:01] And so this next story is a story that was in CNN health. It's more maja RFK news for everybody. So this was RFK Jr. launches plan to address the overuse of psychiatric medications. And then there was a recent Maha Institute summit on mental health and overmedicalization. So Russ, do you want to take this story? Yeah, I can kind of take us through some of these clips from RFK's talk at this summit. I think the first clip we have is just one I always think is ironic to play when they start talking about how important this administration thinks mental health is, which is RFK thanking Donald Trump. I want to thank President Trump for his leadership, for driving this effort, and for advancing the great American recovery initiative through executive action, which aligns directly with the work that we are doing today to restore health, accountability, and trust in the system.
[02:00] Oh man. Yeah. What he's pushing is that like the line that he's pushing is supporting patient autonomy, requiring informed consent and shared decision-making and shifting the standard of care towards prevention, transparency, and a more holistic approach to mental health. all fine talking points in my opinion. But I think my big takeaway from this summit and we'll watch a few more clips from it is that these are not new things. These are the things that mental health organizations and providers have been discussing as things that need done around anti-depressant medications and prescriptions and things like that. And beyond the talking points that are sort of stigmatizing mental health drugs, all they're saying is that with your doctor, you should be discussing whether these are the right drugs for you, whether you need to come off the drugs, whether it would be good for you to come off the drugs, and how to taper
[03:02] Off of these drugs. And none of that is new. None of that is radical. that is legitimately the standard of care that should be being implemented that all mental health providers would tell you. It's just they're in turn stigmatizing these drugs and being on them and the patients that use them in their rhetoric and making people probably more likely to just drop these meds altogether in an unhealthy way, in a way that wouldn't be recommended by their mental health providers. Because saying you should be working with your mental health provider and tapering and taking the safe way and not everyone actually needs to come off of these, that comes like many many paragraphs down in their rhetoric.
[03:48] The rhetoric that's the top line is there's an overprescription of mental health medications and it's unnecessary and all of this stuff. And in fact, to reinforce that point, if you want to play clip two, this is how they talk about the experts. And the New York Times and a lot of other outlets published a response from that saying that the experts disagreed with the secretary. And we all know that whenever they say trust the experts, they're they got nothing. Okay, they got nothing. But that's the general angle that the RFK maha movement is taking as they're pushing stuff that actually isn't radical when you actually start to look at it. The idea of like this the tapering the importance of understanding the medications you're taking.
[04:36] Those are all great, but then they're gussying it up in language that the experts don't know what they're talking about. They're not letting you talk about this stuff. It's all completely contradictory in my opinion. Yeah. No. And it feels like trying to kind of give this vibe that like they're the normal ones, right? Like we're going to come out and recommend living healthy. We're going to recommend tapering off of drugs if you've been taking them. We're going to recommend including therapy along with your anti-depressants. And like a lot of people are listening to that going, "Wow, great." like this is such a like noble thing for our government to doing to be doing and they don't even realize like that's what we've been doing this. Yeah, that was the position of the lib doctor. [laughter] You know, it's as if that's not what the experts are saying.
[05:24] The experts don't know what they're talking about here. Follow us saying exactly what they've been saying [laughter] for like the past decade. Don't trust the experts. Listen to me. Apples are actually good for you. Yes, the experts they got nothing. Sorry to interrupt the content. If you are enjoying it so far and you want to give us a like and subscribe, that goes a long way. If you want more content like this, you can also find bonus content on our Patreon page. Go and check that out. [laughter] In talking with Normie about this, I just looked up in Upto-date, which is the a database that's programmed into most electronic medical record companies that gives you like easy patient handouts for certain medications, certain procedures, all that kind of stuff.
[06:11] We use in like nursing or doctors can print these out from their electronic medical record stuff. I just looked up search just to see what the topline recommendations were and they were exactly that which is talk with your doctor if you're thinking about coming off of these. They need to be tapered. Like they can cause reactions if you just drop them. Like it's not something that you can't talk about. It's not something that's not being talked about. And they take this kind of podcast bro approach to medicine which is these are the things they don't want you to know about these drugs. Yeah. And it sounds like they're basically trying to throw the sort of ideal over to this recommendation that was published in JAMAMA for the deprescribing of psychotropic medications.
[07:04] And like you know even just looking through it like clinicians should regularly and systematically evaluate the relevance and appropriateness of all components within a psychopharmarmacology regimen to determine when monitored deprescribing appears indicated. Yes. Yeah. So it's all splash. Like got them. Then if you but [laughter] but what they are doing what they are doing around deprescription if you want to play clip four is introducing ways for doctors to get paid out for deprescribing people now and which is a new move. At the same time CMS the center for medical medicaid and Medicare services is issuing billing guidance that allows clinicians to get paid or deprescribing work for the first time care plans.
[07:53] And so at the same time that they are saying you should listen to your doctor, you should have informed discussions and all of this stuff around your mental health medications, they're also incentivizing the deprescription of these medications for doctors. Trust your doctor who we've incentivized against prescribing medications. Yeah. Although I guess I don't know that is tough because I do feel like for years doctors have been kind of incentivized into prescribing medications. And so absolutely. You know, there is like I don't know. The thing with a lot of the Maha just remove the incentive in general. Probably the thing with so much of the Maha stuff to me is that there is maybe you guys disagree, but in so much of it there's like a little kernel of truth there to a lot of the stuff that they address, but the whole to me maha it's just a smoke screen for the administration to say that we're tackling these big things and meanwhile they're doing nothing about Roundup.
[08:53] And the biggest thing to me is how devastating that they want to increase access to mental health. No, they [expletive] don't. Like they have cut these programs. I just don't I don't know how anyone takes any of it seriously. the amount of people this administration has kicked off of health care and has kicked off of food benefits, which access to food for a child, a developing child is like the single most important thing in life. And then they get up there and they have the audacity to say that we care about mental health. Like there was so this was a recent from the center on budget and policy priority priorities and this was data this was available data.
[09:41] It says as of May 2026. Yeah. And this was the available data from the 12 states that had data available that showed the amount of people total amount of people. So it's almost 1.6 6 million people who have lost benefits to SNAP, including 728 more than 728,000 children at this point since the big beautiful bill was enacted last year. And this is only 12 states, over 700,000 children. And the estimates are that the big beautiful bill is going to result in 10 to something like 10 to 16 million people being removed from their health care for like a variety of different reasons.
[10:29] There's work requirements, the reduced federal funding, the kicking the some of the SNAP, some of the SNAP expenses over to the states, getting rid of the ACA tax credit. The big thing is the redeterminations in work, which is a lot of like a lot of people are going to miss notifications. They have to reapply every 6 months. It's like a lot of paperwork that's involved in it. It's going to kick people off. So again, it's like this is such a similar argument to so much of the stuff that we've done in the psychedelic space over the years. You get everybody talking about the mental health revolution while no one is focused on like the just the various like systemic drivers of mental health in the first place. It's the same issue here. They're trying to oh, we're so for mental health, but don't look at the fact that we are sending millions of children to bed every night hungry.
[11:23] Yeah. And that's one of the things like that RFK specifically calls out in that talk which he gave which is that he's had family members who have had to quickly get dropped from their mental health medication, their depression medications and it's had terrible effects like suicidality and things like that. And then he does not get into why someone might have to quickly stop their depression medications, which would be like monetary, financial reasons, getting kicked off your insurance, losing your provider, all of that kind of stuff, which is happening under this administration are the exact reasons someone would have to stop without tapering their mental health medications. The Yeah. And the elephant in the room is the only way you're going to have accessible mental health care for people is with Medicare for all and socialized medicine.
[12:15] And if you're not like advocating for those for that as a policy decision, you're just not serious about this conversation whatsoever. Absolutely. Yep. Housing and food security are like the number one things we can do for mental health. Yeah, like just making sure that everyone has food and housing would go a long way in addressing our mental health crisis right now.
