It's Tuesday, May 5th, 2026 from Peachfish Productions.

It's The Gist.

I'm Mike Peska.

There is a new initiative out of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy,

to get people off their meds, off their psychiatric medication, and in fact, top psychiatrists are calling

for a greater emphasis on seeking medication. That's a Times headline. The idea that psychiatrists are

pointing to is that sometimes patients are put or parked on these medications and not really reevaluated.

And yes, they could, in fact, benefit from moving off the medications.

Kennedy, I think, is not being so subtle.

He is just saying that psychiatric medications are overprescribed, and he knows this because

they're overprescribed.

It's weird because, though I am not on psychiatric medications or

antidepressants of any kind, one of the things that makes me more depressed about things in

American life than almost anything else is Robert F. Kennedy himself. I understand politics.

I understand people with policy priorities that I disagree with.

I don't understand how and why this guy rose to such prominence, even though the policies

that he champions, though popular, for a fringe, are just that. Fringe policies. They're not widely popular. They hurt the Republican

coalition. Basically, there's a lot of political science that says when you raise the salience of an

issue, what you do is you make your own side happy, but you make the other side equally unhappy.

And there was a whole other side of people,

say, who are into giving their kids vaccines, who didn't really craft their identity around giving

their kids vaccines. They just wanted to be good parents and keep some of the worst diseases

...