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There are many elements of this initiative that would be well received by mental health professionals.
Unfortunately, the targeted audience for this campaign was left out and scapegoated.
This initiative also ignores the perhaps even bigger problem of under-treatment.
As expected, the US Health and Human Services Administration, led by Secretary Robert Kennedy, launched its “MAHA Action Plan to Curb Psychiatric Overprescribing” on May 4.
On one level, the message resonates with many initiatives that mental health professionals, including myself, have been doing for years. There have long been concerns that psychiatric medications can be used too soon before things like therapy, family interventions, and health promotion activities. There is also a need to help prescribing clinicians safely discontinue or “deprescribe” medications that don’t work or are no longer needed. Again, this is nothing new. I have been giving presentations on deprescribing since 2017, and I was hardly the first person to talk about this.
It was also nice to see in their attached “Dear Colleague” letter directed to folks like me with acknowledgements like “psychiatric medications can play an important and, at times, essential role in treatment.”
The problem is that embedded in........