Psychiatrists have joined other public health groups in calling for the removal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary.

Two psychiatry organizations — the Southern California Psychiatry Society and the recently formed grassroots Committee to Protect Public Mental Health — have released statements saying that the actions of the leader of the Department of Health and Human Services have increased stigma, instilled fear and hurt access to mental health and addiction care.

“As physicians committed to evidence-based care, we are alarmed by the direction of HHS under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr,” the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health said in a statement.

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
      40·
      8 days ago

      Hopefully the people will. The more resistance, the less damage they can do. So, even if it seems inconsequential, it’s important.

      It also shows, afterwards, who resisted and who was compliant.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
      38·
      8 days ago

      Mental Healcare professionals have an entirely reasonable and necessary ethical requirement not to diagnose people who they haven’t examined.

      It must be super frustrating right now seeing the President’s clear dementia, narcisissm, and sociopathy and having to stay silent.

      • grue@lemmy.world
        19·
        8 days ago

        Yeah, they can speak out about RFK in a way they can’t about Trump because they’re objecting to RFK’s medical quackery and disinformation, not his mental state.

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
      14·
      8 days ago

      A psychiatrist might suggest “do not take more on your plate then you can handle”

      Too broad and it will just be ignored as general activism. Even if rfk remains the message has more effect by being focused on their domain off expertise.

        • fartographer@lemmy.world
          6·
          8 days ago

          That’s a really good point! AI does have the potential to fill in for us when we get tired! Would you like to discuss other benefits to giving in to your new overlord?

  • lennybird@lemmy.worldEnglish
    232·
    8 days ago

    Russia and the GOP successfully undermined all trust in expert consensus.

    In the absence thereof, we are literally adrift in a raging storm of misinformation.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
      7·
      8 days ago

      Not really though. Reality is readily accessible to all Americans still. The ones who shun it are making an active choice to be shit.

      • lennybird@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        I must respectfully disagree if you don’t mind. I wish for this to be true, easier to fix, and to at least understand — but let me try to explain why I think that’s not true:

        Reality trickles into any authoritarian state, be it Russia, Hungary, North Korea, and now the USA; but in order for it to take hold in a person’s mind, you need to:

        • Filter through education (and thus critical-thinking skills) or lack thereof
        • Economic pressures (how much time do these people have)
        • How much BULLSHIT must they parse through to get to the truth?
        • What is your surrounding peer group and tribe like, reinforcing beliefs (e.g., are you in deep Alabama and among church-goers and truckers who tune into right-wing talk radio?)
        • Is your head in a healthy state of mind? (lead exposure, factory pollutants, substance abuse like meth and alcohol).

        Tell a lie enough and it becomes true. It’s the ratio of falsehoods to truth that sadly matters more for the untrained mind. Why shitty parents have such an impact on their children. The combination of authority and disproportionate hearing of bullshit for years on end relative to what else they hear of the outside world.

        In this era of disinfo ops with the expressed intent to gaslight and detach people from reality, it becomes very difficult. Surkov Theatrics in a nutshell. If you especially lack time; that is, raising a family, going to school, working 3 jobs to make ends meet, then you lack the necessary time to parse through the bullshit to dial into the truth.

        You must understand. You and I simply being here and discussing this put us in the top 1 percentile in terms of how informed we are on this stuff. From our perspectives, it’s so abundantly obvious that it’s easy to think anyone could get here.

  • foodandart@lemmy.zip
    10·
    8 days ago

    As horrifying as it will be… it’s going to take some godawful disease like polio to rear it’s ugly head again for the vast muddling middle to wake the hell up.

    I remember a friend of my aunt who was in a wheelchair - she was in her 70’s when I was a teenager and she had gotten polio as a little girl. Lovely woman, and a real example of what can happen without vaccines.

    God save us, generational amnesia is a thing, and we’ve gotten complacent because vaccines haved worked so well for the last 75 years.

  • MrSmiley@lemmy.zip
    8·
    8 days ago

    Incredible as some of these aberrations may appear, we must yet be on our guard not to dismiss them as mere accidental by-products which have nothing to do with the essential character of a planned or totalitarian system. They are not. They are a direct result of that same desire to see everything directed by a “unitary conception of the whole,” of the need to uphold at all costs the views in the service of which people are asked to make constant sacrifices, and of the general idea that the knowledge and beliefs of the people are an instrument to be used for a single purpose. Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interests of a class, a community, or a state, the sole task of argument and discussion is to vindicate and to spread still further the beliefs by which the whole life of the community is directed. As the Nazi minister of justice has explained, the question which every new scientific theory must ask itself is: “Do I serve National Socialism for the greatest benefit of all?”

    The Road to Serfdom, Ch. 11 The End of Truth, F. A. Hayek