Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a new campaign to reduce the use of antidepressants, including encouraging clinicians to “de-prescribe” Medicare patients from the drugs by instead prescribing “non-pharmacological” services such as therapy.

The initiative will also include training for clinicians on the risks of psychiatric medications and how to “taper” patients off the drugs slowly to avoid severe withdrawal symptoms, though the incidence rate of those symptoms is unclear.

“We’re not telling you to stop” any medications, Kennedy said at a Monday event hosted by the Make America Healthy Again Institute, a Kennedy-allied think tank. Instead, the initiative aims to make sure patients and clinicians “have the information and support to make the right decisions for you,” he said.

“That includes a safe, evidence-based path to tapering and discontinuation when clinically appropriate,” Kennedy said.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will offer the training beginning this summer, Kennedy said. He did not offer details on which psychiatric medications would be included in the new clinician training.

“I watched a family member get off of them after a couple of years on them, and she was suicidal literally every day,” Kennedy said, appearing to tear up, about witnessing a loved one experience side effects while transitioning off medication.

The medical community has begun to take concerns around the “overprescribing” of psychiatric medications seriously. Change is happening, albeit slowly. Last week, a group of psychiatrists published new guidelines for clinicians seeking to help patients stop taking drugs that they are “parked” on. Those recommendations include weighing the risks and benefits of going off medications. While psychiatric organizations argue that antidepressants have been tested for safety, many in the profession are advocating for more rigorous thinking around how to give patients off-ramps.

Some people do suffer significant side effects when attempting to stop the use of antidepressants, and researchers have called for more studies on what symptoms occur, how to prevent them and how common they are. A review of 79 studies found that 1 in 3 patients quitting an antidepressant had withdrawal symptoms (though so did 1 in 6 patients quitting a placebo).

Kennedy, supported by his MAHA allies, has long railed against the use of prescription drugs to treat mental health conditions. He has posited that the use of psychoactive drugs in children could cause them to commit mass shootings, and called antidepressants as addictive as heroin during his Senate confirmation hearing — claims not supported by most scientists.

Monday’s event is one of eight that the MAHA Institute has put on covering the movement’s main agenda items. Past events held by the policy center focused on autism, women’s health and the “weaponization of science,” to name a few.

Seven Department of Health and Human Services officials spoke at the Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit, which included panels with titles like “Children First: Addressing the Overmedicalization of Children and Fostering the Future” and “Psychiatric Drugs: Informed Choice and Building Safe Off-Ramps.”

“We need to be more honest about overmedicalization in this country,” Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, a physician who also leads the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, told the audience.

“Too often, we’re quick to pull out the prescription pen and pad,” Christine said.

HHS officials’ attendance at the event highlights how the MAHA Institute is emerging as a power center in Washington. It also serves as an indicator of which MAHA priorities are politically palatable for the Trump administration.

A previous MAHA Institute event on the “Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury” featured zero speakers from the administration.

Mark Gorton, president of the MAHA Institute, told NOTUS more administration officials were willing to attend Monday’s event than previous summits because the Institute is “a little bit more strategic — we have a better sense of how things are working inside” the administration, and “which areas we focus on we’ll be actually able to move the needle somewhere.”

Possible future MAHA Institute events might include panels on the psychological harms of social media and on reforms to health data collection, Gorton said: He wants the summits to give administration officials “the opportunity to push their stuff forward.”

The movement has struggled to regain its footing after several setbacks, including the replacement of Casey Means as surgeon general nominee.

But Gorton doesn’t see the event’s focus on mental health as the MAHA movement pivoting to issues that are less politically turbulent, because “basically every aspect of our health system is distorted in some way,” he said.

Administration officials have expressed a willingness to engage with the issue of overprescription — one that, like improvements to the U.S. diet, might enjoy more widespread support than challenges to vaccines.

The officials present at the summit hailed from a wide range of federal agencies: One panel alone included representatives from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Food and Drug Administration and SAMHSA.

At one point, the acting director of the NIMH, Andrea Beckel-Mitchener, put out a call for grant applications for research on the effects of antidepressants.

“The NIMH is always a home for research studies on this topic,” Beckel-Mitchener said. “I want to make sure that this audience does know that.”

The administration officials spoke alongside advocates for less reliance on prescription drugs to treat mental health diagnoses, including Lauren Delano, who founded an organization that supports people who want to discontinue taking psychiatric drugs and hopes to “shift culture, science, and policy away from medicalized responses to human suffering.”

“I hope there’s a lot of crying today,” Delano told the crowd early in the day. And there was: At least four people, including Kennedy and Delano herself, teared up while describing their experiences with antidepressants.