Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent years turning medical consensus into a public argument. Now, as he raises alarms about SSRIs, the most common anxiety drugs in America are quietly winning the numbers game anyway.
What You Should Know
U.S. survey data show the share of adults taking anxiety medication rose from 11.7% in 2019 to 14.3% in 2024, about 38 million people total. Clinicians say SSRIs remain a front-line treatment for anxiety, despite side effects and public criticism.
The latest flashpoint came through reporting by CBS News and KFF Health News, which paired Kennedy’s skepticism with a very different reality inside exam rooms: more patients asking for help, more prescriptions filled, and more doctors insisting the evidence still points to SSRIs as a workhorse option when anxiety stops being manageable.
Sadia Zapp, a 40-year-old communications director in New York, told KFF Health News she started Lexapro after breast cancer treatment left her stuck in a loop of physical worry. “I love it. It’s been great,” she said. “It’s really helped me manage.”
The Numbers Are Moving, Even as the Talk Gets Louder
Start with the part nobody can spin: the customer base is getting bigger.
According to CDC survey data cited in the CBS News report, the proportion of American adults who took anxiety medications climbed from 11.7% in 2019 to 14.3% in 2024. That is about 8 million more people, for a total of around 38 million. The increase was steepest during the COVID-era years, and it showed sharp jumps among young adults, people with a college degree, and adults who identify as LGBTQ+.
That surge matters because it reframes the political argument. If you are trying to convince the public that a widely used class of medications is suspect, you are not arguing about a niche product anymore. You are arguing about something woven into daily life for tens of millions of people, including voters, patients with long medical histories, and families watching symptoms improve or worsen in real time.
In other words, Kennedy is not just challenging pharmaceutical marketing. He is challenging the lived experience of a growing slice of the country that has already calculated risk, relief, and function.
What RFK Jr. Is Really Challenging
Kennedy’s comments about SSRIs, as described in the CBS News report, land in familiar territory for him: a broad critique of modern medicine, expert institutions, and the idea that the default answer to a health problem should come in a bottle.
The tension is that SSRIs are not generally sold by clinicians as a magic fix. They are often pitched as one tool among several, particularly when paired with therapy. That is not a small distinction. It is the gap between an ideological fight and the way medicine is practiced when the goal is to keep someone working, parenting, sleeping, and, in many cases, staying out of crisis.
Patrick Kelly, president of the Southern California Psychiatric Society, was blunt in the report about the evidence base behind Kennedy’s attacks. “The statements about SSRIs were just not grounded in any sort of evidence or fact,” Kelly said.
There is also a power dynamic hiding in plain sight. When a high-profile national figure questions a medical treatment, the audience is not just the public. It is also insurers, lawmakers, platform moderators, and agency officials who decide what messaging gets amplified, what gets treated as “controversy,” and what gets labeled “misinformation” or “debate.”
SSRIs sit right in the middle of that battlefield: common enough to be politically useful, complicated enough to be easily mischaracterized, and personal enough that people will defend their own outcomes without waiting for a panel discussion.
The Trade-Off Patients Make, and Doctors Have to Explain
SSRIs are not a free lunch. Even supporters admit that.
In the CBS News report, KFF Health News notes common side effects that can include upset stomach, brain fog, and fatigue. Some SSRIs can reduce libido and create other sexual side effects. That list alone is enough to make some patients balk or stop a medication after trying it.
That is the part Kennedy and other critics can point to without stretching. The part they cannot do, at least not honestly, is skip over the other side of the ledger: untreated or undertreated anxiety can be debilitating, and for some patients, it is physically and socially expensive. It can mean missed work, strained relationships, insomnia, panic symptoms that mimic medical emergencies, and a constant background noise that crowds out daily life.
A comprehensive study described in the report found that more than half of people with generalized anxiety disorder taking an SSRI saw symptoms reduced by at least 50%. Side effects led about 1 in 12 people to stop taking the medication.
Those two numbers are the core of the bargain. Many people get meaningful relief. A measurable minority cannot tolerate the cost.
Emily Wood, a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, also emphasized the conditions under which SSRIs tend to work best. “When it’s being done right and when you’re also using appropriate therapy techniques, SSRIs can be really, really helpful,” she said.
That quote matters because it pushes back on a common public misconception: that taking an SSRI is either a sign of weakness or a sign of blind trust in the pharmaceutical industry. In practice, many clinicians talk about medication as a bridge, a stabilizer, or a tool that makes therapy and behavioral changes more possible.
It is also where the system gets exposed. Therapy takes time, money, and access. Medication can be prescribed in minutes. When anxiety spikes across a population, the fastest lever in a stressed health care market is often the prescription pad.
The Real Stakes: Policy, Coverage, and Trust
The SSRI argument is not just cultural. It can become operational.
If public pressure turns SSRIs into a political liability, the ripple effects can hit multiple choke points at once. Insurers can tighten coverage. Employers can change what mental health benefits look like. State lawmakers can stage hearings that recast standard psychiatric care as suspect. Online platforms can end up policing content with a heavy hand, or with no hand at all, and both approaches can backfire.
Meanwhile, the patients caught in the middle are not abstractions. The CBS News and KFF Health News story centers on Zapp’s post-cancer anxiety, which is the kind of case that scrambles easy narratives. A person can be grateful for lifesaving oncology care and still need psychiatric help afterward. They may want fewer pills and still need one to get through the day.
That contradiction is where political messaging tends to break. A sweeping argument about “medication culture” does not land the same way when the listener has a calendar full of follow-up scans, or when their anxiety turns every minor ache into a countdown.
“Every little ache, like my knee hurts,” Zapp said, made her worry that “this is the end of the road for me.”
In a country where mental health conversations have become both more open and more weaponized, SSRIs end up serving as a proxy. For critics, they can represent overreach by pharma and credentialed experts. For supporters, they can represent modern medicine doing something quietly effective, even if imperfect.
Neither side has to be purely cynical for the conflict to get messy. People can distrust institutions and still benefit from treatment. Doctors can acknowledge side effects and still prescribe because the alternative is worse. Politicians can raise legitimate questions about industry influence and still mislead when they flatten complex evidence into a viral talking point.
What to Watch Next
Three pressure points will shape what happens next, and none of them is just about science.
- Messaging: Whether public figures keep targeting SSRIs, and whether they do it with specifics or broad insinuation.
- Access: Whether therapy availability, insurance coverage, and wait times improve, or whether medication continues to carry the load by default.
- Patient trust: Whether people already on SSRIs feel empowered to ask questions, or pushed into panic decisions about stopping or switching.
In the short term, the most reliable indicator is not a speech or a trending clip. It is the same indicator that has already been moving: how many people, after a long stretch of white-knuckling it, decide they want relief that is measurable, repeatable, and covered by their plan.
Kennedy can turn SSRIs into a headline. Clinicians and patients still have to live with the trade-offs.
