If You Have ADHD, You Need to Know RFK Jr’s Plans for People on Meds
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Don’t panic…yet. But maybe get ready.
I’ve resisted writing much about the election, because…well, it certainly didn’t go the way I expected or wanted, and that is still a sore spot.
However, when I saw the news that Trump was going to make good on his promise to make RFK Jr. the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I had a random thought: I wonder what this vaccine-denying conspiracy theorist thinks about ADHD and medications?
So I “did my own research” (aka lots of DuckDuckGo queries) and at first was encourage by the fact that most of the results were about his other health opinions, but nothing on the first page mentioned ADHD.
Then I read Kiera Butler’s article in Mother Jones, and I got very, very worried.
The Terrifying Words of Malicious Care
The plan is pretty straightforward, as RFK Jr. put it during a live recording of the Latino Capitalist podcast (all quotes are his words :
Put a tax on cannabis products (because the devil’s cabbage is now the conservatives’ lettuce, apparently).
Use the money to create “…wellness farms — drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.”
On these farms, there would be no screens or cell phones access.
What would be the aim for sending people to the farms? That’s where I read the words that really sent chills down my spine:
“…they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” (emphasis added).
Ms. Butler notes towards the end of the article:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 11 percent of Americans ages 12 and older take antidepressants, and about 4 percent of Americans between the ages of 5 and 64 take medication for ADHD.
Including me, my partner, my grandsons, my daughters’ spouses, and many of my closest friends.
“Wellness Farms” — that’s not sinister at ALL.
There were so many chilling, passive-aggressive threats in his “simple” solution.
“Wellness Farms”
“re-parented”
“as much time as they need”
What I hear with those words are “we’re going to take people away from their friends and families, chosen or biological, as well as cutting them off from society, and put them somewhere that they won’t keep bothering all of us “normal” people.”
After all, if working a farm was the key to mental health and wellness, then studies like this one from the National Center for Farmworker Health probably wouldn’t come to conclusions such as:
“Among the 915,725 agricultural workers and their family members who received health care services at Migrant Health Centers in 2019, mental health disorders were one of the most commonly reported diagnoses.”
Two studies of LatinX farm workers found that one in three women and one in four overall suffer from “elevated depressive symptoms…significantly greater than the rate of depression among U.S. Hispanic females.”
“Nationwide, agricultural workers who report having low control in their jobs and a high psychological demand at work are more likely to experience depressive symptoms.”
“Social isolation was the strongest contributor to anxiety.”
Now, to be fair, some of those statistics were from studies with very small sample sizes, and the vast majority of them were Latinx migrants.
But when I realized that, I could hear this crinkling sound as a tinfoil hat began to materialize around my head.
If you don’t want to hear a really dystopian theory that will possibly keep you up at night, stop reading now. Seriously, even I shake my head at myself when my lovely ADHD brain chose to link up these particular things.
For those smart ones, who stop reading before the next subheading, thanks for your time and attention! I know you have a lot of choices today for your ADHD articles, and I’m grateful that you chose to click on this one. Happy reading, and may the odds be ever in your…(checks notes)* Ah, I can’t say that, copyright reasons. Well, have a nice day!
For the rest of you…buckle up.
If they were being really sneaky, this would just be part of a bigger plan.
This morning, watching John Oliver talking about how high grocery prices had motivated voters to choose the party that also promised mass deportations, my partner turned to me and said “Don’t people realize that if there are mass deportations, the grocery prices will go up because the farm workers will be gone?”
That would indeed be illogical — unless there was another workforce waiting to replace them.
Something like 11% of the American population over the age of twelve? I’m not that great at statistics, but I did find figures suggesting that immigrants make up 19% of the U.S. workforce, but only 4% of those work in agriculture…and it seems to me that 11% of the total population is a lot more than 4% of the total workforce. So yeah.
They can easily replace the deportees in the name of “wellness”
By taking away their medication they would likely exacerbate the illnesses treated by them
By taking away their cell phones they remove the possibility of communicating with anyone outside of the “farm.”
I know. That’s crazy talk.
Couldn’t happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave, right? I hope you’re right. I really do hope this is just my brain leaping to way-too-outlandish conclusions.
But I keep thinking about other “farms” that are supposed to have been good for the people sent to them — from the Maoist “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement” to the ubiquitous parental “…we sent him to a nice farm up north…”
Seems to me the idea that “work will make you free” has been established to be a bad one, even if it’s supposedly free from addiction or mental illness.
I’m not going to panic.
Yet.
* (checks other notes) The “(checks notes)” is shamelessly stolen from Chuck Wendig, and I probably shouldn’t be using that either.