You can pry my antidepressants from my cold, dead hands

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There’s a passage in the 2014 novel Station Eleven that has stuck with me since I read it. The book is about the world before and after a fictional global pandemic, and in the aftermath survivors create settlements—including one at an airport.

In the passage, a teenage girl approaches Clark, one of the characters, and says, "I'm sorry to ask, but do you have any Effexor? I've run out. I'm asking everyone." Clark says he doesn’t and then asks what that is. She tells him it’s an antidepressant. "I'm so sorry. How awful for you,” he replies. The teenager moves on, asking others to no avail. Later they realize she’s left the airport without any of her belongings. She could not live without her necessary medication.

At the time I read this, I was on the same antidepressant. The idea that being deprived of this medication was someone’s idea of a worst-case-scenario struck me, and I remember mentioning it at the time to my therapist. What would happen, I wondered, if one day I couldn’t access it?

The fear of deprivation came rushing back Thursday when Trump released a new executive order called, “Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission.”  It was published just a few hours after the Senate confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a dangerous anti-vaxxer who rebukes modern medical science. 

In the first paragraph of the executive order it states, in addition to other health statistics, that one in five American adults lives with mental illness. The document quickly zeroes in on children—how the rates of disease impact them and how to fix it.

“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 reads. This includes, “over-reliance on medication and treatments.” 

Further down it announces a “Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment”, which, among other things, will, “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.” 

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly referred to as SSRIs, are a class of medication that includes widely-used drugs like Lexapro, Zoloft, Prozac and others. They’re most commonly used to treat depression and anxiety, and there are similar classes of drugs used for the same purpose. From 2015-2018 more than 13% of adults 18 and over used an antidepressant, and that was before the COVID pandemic turned our lives upside down. 

I switched to Prozac on January 6, 2021 (a pure coincidence) at a time when life felt particularly grim. We were nearly a year into the pandemic, and even though vaccines had started to be administered to vulnerable people and frontline workers, a feeling of safety still felt far off. I was also coming up on three years of dealing with a tumor at the base of my brain on my pituitary tumor, and was scheduled for a last-ditch surgery a few weeks later to possibly remove it once and for all. I was afraid to hope. Then I switched to a new psychiatric nurse practitioner who suggested giving Prozac a try, and it changed everything.

Despite the extreme physical health challenges of those initial few months, I got through it. And here I am today, having a manageable amount of mental health challenges instead of ones that made every single day feel like a battle. Being on the right antidepressant is just as important as being on one at all.

But now this administration is questioning whether we should have that choice at all, an idea that I and millions of Americans find intolerable. While this initial action focuses on minors, there is almost certainly no way it remains confined to them. As we’ve seen with the attack on health care for trans minors, children often serve as the canary in the coal mine for abusive conservatives’ most radical ideas.

As a Republican state lawmaker in Michigan said last year, “In terms of endgame, why are we allowing these practices for anyone? If we are going to stop this for anyone under 18, why not apply it for anyone over 18? It’s harmful across the board, and that’s something we need to take into consideration in terms of the endgame.”

Writing about a current Supreme Court case that seeks to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, Katelyn Burns noted, “A conservative win in Skrmetti would represent a very large bite into the trans right to live free of government interference, and it would signal to states and the Trump administration that it’s truly open season on trans lives.”

It doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to see a wholesale attack on mental illness and it’s crucial treatments in the near future. Last summer when he was still running for president, Kennedy talked about the creation of “wellness farms” and the description of his big idea is chilling.

In a 2023 conversation with De facto American head of state Elon Musk, Kennedy blamed antidepressants for the rise in school shootings. "Prior to the introduction of Prozac we had almost none of these events in our country.”

Musk himself has been vocal about his disdain for scientifically proven mental health medications. On Friday, a random X/Twitter account he often interacts with posted, “Over 50% of young Liberal Women have been diagnosed with a mental health condition.” (It was accompanied by a chart claiming to be from a 2020 Pew research study, but when I viewed the actual study, it was nowhere to be found. The image shared can be traced back to a joke meme website.) Musk shared the post, adding, “Looks like over-diagnosis & over-medication of the youth is a major problem.”

In an October interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk said, "I think SSRIs are the Devil. They're zombifying people, changing their personalities." He has said Wellbutrin should be “taken off the market” and derided ADHD treatments like Ritalin and Adderall. (He has admitted to having ketamine treatments to treat his own mental health struggles.) And Trump, as we know, doesn’t actually believe in anything—which has made him the perfect vessel for men like Musk and Kennedy to launder their dangerous lies. 

None of this is to say that SSRIs and the like should be prescribed indiscriminately or that people haven’t had bad experiences with them. Those who take them should be monitored by a professional. But what it comes down to, as it does with so many fascist ideas, is the removal of choice—especially when it comes to established health care. People should not have to suffer the anguish of being denied life-saving drugs because a couple of guys have decided to apply conspiracy theories instead of established science. 

But if this past week taught us anything, it’s that we are very much at the whims of These Guys. 

This Wednesday, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services have been invited to a meet and greet with new Secretary Kennedy. “Selfies are welcome!” the email alert said. And who wouldn’t want a photograph with the man about to unravel their life’s work?

I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the thousands of federal workers who were fired this week by maniacal men hellbent on destroying our government. Many of them have reached out to me with their stories, and I spent most of the week trying to share as much information as possible via posts on Bluesky.

It was because of crucial information passed along to me that I was able to break the story of a data breach at the US Coast Guard, in which the personal banking info of more than 1,000 members was compromised. I was also able to share breaking updates about the agencies impacted by layoffs, and violations of workers’ rights.

I hope you’ll continue reaching out as new information comes to light, and I’ll do my very best to make sure people know about it. Send tips via email to [email protected] or to Marisakabas.04 on Signal.