After newly sworn-in president Donald Trump signed a controversial new executive order impacting children’s access to psychiatric medication this week, a handful of horrified US residents have spoken out.
The Republican leader announced the introduction of a new campaign, titled the ‘Make America Healthy Again Commission’, yesterday (19 Feb), which would focus on the wellbeing of American children, with a specific focus on mental health and illness.
The commission – which will be chaired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr (the US Health and Human Services Secretary) – calls for ‘drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease’.
It vows to do so by ‘assessing the threat that potential over-utilisation of medication’, ‘certain chemicals’, and ‘certain other exposures’ pose to children.
78-year-old Trump’s new order also pledges to ‘assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilisers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs’.
The policy states that, in 100 days’ time, the new commission must submit a report regarding prescriptions of these such medications.