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.
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