RFK Jr. and MAHA Send Psychiatrists into a Panic Attack

In this American Greatness article, psychiatrist Carole Lieberman argues that RFK Jr.’s MAHA push against psychiatric overprescription is directionally right but incomplete unless it confronts the insurance-driven system that replaced meaningful therapy with quick medication visits.

• Lieberman says RFK Jr.’s skepticism toward psychiatry is shaped partly by family history, including Rosemary Kennedy’s lobotomy, as well as his own recovery through abstinence-based 12-step programs rather than psychiatry or medication.
• The article frames RFK Jr.’s recent MAHA Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit as the beginning of a “deprescribing” effort, with SSRI antidepressants as an early target.
• Lieberman agrees that overprescription is a serious problem, but warns that simply targeting SSRIs does not address why psychiatrists became so prescription-focused in the first place.
• She argues that Big Insurance helped create the problem by making traditional 50-minute psychotherapy sessions financially unsustainable for many psychiatrists.
• According to the article, many psychiatrists adapted by shifting to short “med visits,” allowing them to see far more patients per day while still being reimbursed.
• Lieberman contends that this system hurts patients by reducing psychiatric care to symptom checks and new prescriptions rather than time, listening, insight, and treatment of root causes.
• The piece criticizes the modern trend of patients being placed on multiple psychiatric drugs while receiving little meaningful therapy or personal attention.
• Lieberman says real reform would require changing insurance incentives so longer psychotherapy sessions are properly covered again.
• She also calls for psychiatry residency programs to spend more time teaching psychotherapy and less time emphasizing pharmaceutical solutions.
• The article concludes that medication alone cannot fix America’s mental health crisis and that a competent, caring psychiatrist who actually listens remains deeply valuable.

Read the full story: https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/23/rfk-jr-and-maha-send-psychiatrists-into-a-panic-attack/