Antidepressant use has skyrocketed among young people in recent years, and that’s drawn the attention of the public health establishment.
SSRI drugs, a type of antidepressant, were originally intended for adults. But in the three decades since Elizabeth Wurtzel’s landmark memoir Prozac Nation hit shelves, prescriptions have become far more common.
One study found that antidepressant prescriptions for young adults and teens increased by nearly 64 percent after the coronavirus pandemic. Teen girls saw the biggest increase, while prescriptions actually dropped for boys.
Some attribute the rise to social media, which has increased awareness around mental health, but has also led young people to diagnose themselves with disorders they might not have.
Antidepressants can be lifesaving for people who need them. For others, they can create new problems, triggering feelings of lethargy, emotional numbness, and reduced sexual desire. And they don’t work for about half of the patients who take them.
Going off antidepressants can also have unwanted side effects, including milder symptoms such as dizziness, headache, nausea, insomnia, and irritability, and more extreme symptoms such as violent behavior and suicidal ideation. Depression relapse is also common.
Critics argue that we lack long-term data on the effects of these drugs on brain development. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health and human services secretary, is a long-time critic of antidepressants and has called for more research into their efficacy. He’s also made false claims linking their use to mass shootings.
Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with Sarah Todd, a health reporter at Stat News, about how antidepressants got political.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Sarah, whether to take antidepressants is a personal decision. But in 2025, what we’ve seen is this increasingly politicized language around them.
Is using SSRIs as a kind of political football something new?
I don’t remember the introduction of Prozac on the scene. But my impression is that they have had periods in which they’ve been more political. At that time, when Elizabeth Wurtzel was writing Prozac Nation, there was a concern that they were going to be the opiate of the masses, and people were just going to numb themselves. That faded away for a while, and now it seems to be very much back in the conversation with the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement.
MAHA has really focused on antidepressants, among other things, and the main voice of MAHA would be HHS Secretary RFK Jr. What has he said about antidepressants exactly?
So there have been a couple of different claims. He said at his confirmation hearings that getting off antidepressants was harder than getting off of heroin and that antidepressants were addictive.
That’s pretty pointed language there. What do we know about the facts? Are SSRIs addictive? Are they hard to come off?
They are not addictive. They don’t produce the spikes in dopamine that you would get with alcohol or drugs like cocaine or heroin, which are so pleasurable that they have you seeking out your next hit as soon as you come off of them.Instead, [SSRIs] work by targeting serotonin in the brain, which is a whole different part of your system. So it’ll make you feel more stable, but not the kind of high that you might get off of a drug. They do, however, have the potential to cause withdrawal symptoms. So that part is a genuine concern.
About 15 percent of Americans experience withdrawal symptoms. And that can be a really wide range: some at the not-so-severe scale, like a headache, and some more concerning, everything from insomnia to very serious suicidal ideation. That would be less common, but it can happen.
I imagine if you’re a person who’s come off of SSRIs and you’ve had those real difficulties, it might feel like, I was addicted, even though they don’t meet the dictionary definition of addiction.
What else has RFK Jr. said about SSRIs?
Another comment that he’s made is suggesting that they’re linked in some way to mass shootings, and that’s one where the evidence is very clear that this isn’t true. I found one paper that said that over the past 30 years, they looked at all the mass shootings in the US, and just 4 percent of the perpetrators had been on antidepressants at any point in their lives. There’s really no evidence that they’re linked to violence.
This summer, the FDA raised questions about taking SSRIs during pregnancy. The FDA’s parent agency, of course, is Health and Human Services. What are the concerns there?
So the concern there is really about the potential effects on the babies from taking antidepressants, and this is a complicated issue. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that SSRIs are safe during pregnancy, and they say the risks of depression going untreated is much higher than the risk for the parent and the child of taking the SSRI.
There is a fair amount of research that’s been done on SSRIs. There are some studies showing that babies might initially be fussier when they’re first born, and that will go away with time as they adjust to not receiving the medication. And there really aren’t any clear, serious risks that have been associated with SSRI use during pregnancy.
As SSRIs go mainstream, are too many people taking them? Are they being overprescribed? What has your reporting told you about that question?
When it comes to antidepressants being overprescribed, especially for children and young people — which is what the MAHA movement has frequently focused on — it’s a good topic to dive into. Reported rates from young people of feelings of sadness and hopelessness have gone up, especially for certain demographics like teen girls and teens who are part of the LGBTQ community.
So it seems like it’s true that antidepressant prescription rates have gone up. It’s also true that the rates of the symptoms that antidepressants are meant to treat have gone up as well. The big takeaway to me is that mental health for young people is a very real issue in the U.S. and something that we should be doing a lot about.
As someone who covers health, you’re aware that the MAHA movement asks a lot of questions about many different things: fluoride, Tylenol, vaccines, seed oils.
We’ve covered some of these things, and we always ask our experts what happens when you start asking questions like, “Do antidepressants cause mass shootings? Are antidepressants linked to problems for babies?” What’s the knock-on effect of all this?
I think the effects of “just asking questions” will depend on what the questions are. For something like SSRIs and mass shootings, where there’s no evidence to suggest that that is a reality in any way, I think asking questions about that could wind up perpetuating stigma against taking antidepressants, which could be really harmful for the people who could otherwise benefit from them. That’s certainly a concern.
When it comes to asking questions about something like, “Are antidepressants overprescribed for young people?”, I don’t think that that’s necessarily a harmful path to go down. We should be thinking about antidepressants as part of a suite of potential mental health treatments that could be used in combination with everything from talk therapy to helping people feel less lonely. It’s a complicated issue. I don’t think that it’s always bad to ask questions, but I do think it’s good to think about what the potential implications are of suggesting bad effects when there’s no evidence to suggest that that would be the case.
