A month before the 1963 assassination, President John F. Kennedy signed the final bill. It aims to reform the American mental health system. The previous year, Ken Kessey Flying over the cuckoo’s nest Calling attention to the rough treatment of mental facilities, like the novel’s protagonist, President’s sister Rosemary receives a lobotomy that left her deep obstacles. Kennedy tried to end “the cold reliance on custody isolation.” I said In a statement to Congress.
Dedication to improving the country’s approach to mental health has become a family project. In 1962, Eunice Kennedy Schreiber launched a sports camp for people with intellectual disabilities, which became the Special Olympics. In the 1970s, Senator Edward Kennedy tried to repair Living conditions of the mental system; in the 90s, he helped Establish Department of Drug Abuse and Mental Health Services. Recently, his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has encompassed the agency in the new. It involves a healthy American administration, including mental health, as one of its focuses.
RFK Jr.’s policy plan has not yet been formulated. So far, he has overseen deep cuts to HHS and began reorganizing the agency internally. He met once, It is reportedlyIn private with the Make America Healthy Commission, created by the President to address chronic health issues. One of its goals is to assess the threat of prescription psychopharmaceuticals. (HHS did not respond to requests for comment.) When speaking publicly, Kennedy has repeatedly returned to the idea that American doctors are overprocessing such drugs.
Kennedy is skilled at picking up the frustration of period magazines. Feelings that doctors are overly dependent on psychotic drugs have attracted more public attention while neglecting side effects and difficult doses. Consistent and affordable access to therapists, or financial and housing assistance, is hard to get. However, as far as RFK Jr. unveils his own ideas about how to deal with these complaints, his proposal remains isolated from robust discussions about mental health care. His clearest proposal is still his campaign promise to create a wellness farm where Americans reunite with the soil and “learning the discipline of hard work.” The idea is merely a retreat to a well-trampled call to deal with mental distress through seemingly natural means, demonstrating the nuances of the debate about psychiatric drug therapy, or the slightest interest in how people can be separated from society for such treatments.
He joined a tradition that dates back more than 200 years when Kennedy first raised a wellness farm in the presidential run and painted an idyllic Mecca picture to treat addiction. Founded in England at the end of the 18th century, the retreat, Quaker and William Talk, along with French physician Philippe Painel, are considered the father of “moral treatment,” an effort to create a humane hospital. Instead of bondage and corporal punishment, the retreat provided a stately country home. Inspired by moral treatment, Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote in 1812 that “women who are employed to cut wood and create fire to help dig up in the garden, and wash, iron and scrubbing the floors will recover.”
Tuke and Pinel believes agriculture is particularly useful, and many early asylum in the United States adopted a “work as a treatment” element, says Neil Gong, a sociologist at UC San Diego. At the time, these institutions were cutting edge and the institutions that ran them believed that “insuperficial” didn’t have to be trapped in chains to improve. “Psychiatric hospitals started in the 19th century and have a very utopian expectation and therapeutic ability around them,” says sociologist and author Andrew Scull. A hopeless remedy: A disturbing quest for psychiatry to cure mental illness. By the end of the 19th century, every state had at least one government-funded institution.
However, when moral treatment was generalized to the larger population, it fell apart. (The retreat was designed to only accept 30 patients.) Over time, government-run asylum was overwhelmed by the incident and ramped up to abuse. On a large scale, the facility “slowed down rapidly to a warehouse where a lot of unpleasant things happened to patients and patients tend to get lost,” Skull told me.
Including agriculture also did not protect against such issues. Fort Worth Narcotic Farm, a federally funded project in 1938; It was promised Combine recovery from drug addiction with honest farm work. According to a 1957 study, in one study, only 25% of patients who were stuck on a treatment plan were stuck on a treatment plan, and most people used the drug after leaving. Opened in 1935, the US drug farm was a temporary home for many well-known jazz musicians, including Chet Baker. But when people left the farm, the majority (everyone 90%) repeated again. It was shut down in 1976 after a Congressional investigation led by Sen. Ted Kennedy found that doctors were testing experimental drugs on people living there, and sometimes giving patients a reward for drugs like heroin and cocaine.
The idea of farm-based detox is so fascinating that many private rehabilitation centres today incorporate nature and agriculture. The idyllic work as a mental health treatment has become a luxurious good, Gong told me, but it is often combined with other service suites, including psychiatric support. Still, there is no overwhelming evidence that care farms are effective in improving outcomes. One review of 2019 Found There is no evidence that “care farms have improved the quality of life for people” and that there is no limited evidence on improving depression and anxiety. “Wellness farms appear to be off the left field when other models, such as permanent supportive housing and supportive employment, have a large evidence base including cost-effectiveness,” Ryan K. McBain, health economist at RAND Corporation, told me. If Kennedy wanted, he might tap on the Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Centers, which evaluates the new program, to assess how effective a national wellness farm is. However, this month, CMMI announcement It has cut funding for several programs.
The most obvious aspect of Kennedy’s plan is not what people do on these farms, and not doing so, they are not taking any kind of psychotic medication. Kennedy painted these pictures as a detox center when describing the farm. There, people tapped their medications for depression and ADHD. In the age of moral therapy, drugs such as antidepressants and ritalin were absent. Nevertheless, moral treatment was seen as an alternative to wild barrage interventions such as blood blood and suppression. For Kennedy, wellness farms are the same. It is an alternative to other treatments and is not a complement.
What role does psychiatric drugs play in mental health treatments for Americans? Real and active Discussion. For many people, psychiatrists can be an important part of recovery. However, modern psychiatrists have many complaints about insurance companies that give more reimbursements for drugs than other treatments and the pharmaceutical industry. round and round Conflict of interest. People working in this field in 2025 Recognize How drugs have He insisted on treatment I have a mental illness It’s simplified or Overrobbery Biology. Deliberations on origins and legitimate responses to mental distress are at the heart of psychiatry. Michel Foucault believed that psychiatry could be a harmful force for controlling society. Psychiatrist Thomas Sass considered mental illness to be completely mythical.
However, Kennedy is virtually not involved in any of these topics. Instead, he littered the water. false claims including The antidepressant is linked to school shootings and is more addictive than heroin. In a podcast last year, he said that wellness farms without psychotic drugs are particularly useful for black children.
Thus, Kennedy’s proposal for a wellness farm shows how his thinking about public health is almost entirely defined by his bias in nature. “Natural” treatments are always excellent, and physical labor and fresh air, or simply a proper diet, can solve complex and widespread health problems. (“They intend to grow their own foods, organic foods, and high quality foods, because many of the behavioral issues are food-related,” Kennedy said. I said This is consistent with his view on vaccination that natural exposure to diseases may be desirable, and it is desirable to address diseases such as measles with diet and hygiene, as he did in the first half of the 20th century.
But we’ve learned a lot in the last 50 years, if not the past 50 years. Facilities that take people away from the community are limited in their own right to be effective public health measures. A more radical idea than a wellness farm is to treat people in a community with a mix of care options they can choose from. The idea also approaches what John F. Kennedy had in mind when he signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963. He didn’t want to shut down the government-run mental centre. He aimed to create 1,500 community mental health centers. This goal has not been realized. Community mental health care gives people access to interdisciplinary litigation management teams of social workers, nurses, physicians and psychologists, as well as social services such as housing and employment support. Creating it on a large scale presents a more obvious and necessary challenge than breathing fresh air and sending people to the farm to the land.
