Less than a month before his assassination in 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed his last bill: a aiming to reform the Mental Health System in America. The previous year, Ken Kesey We flew over the cuckoo nest had drawn attention to raw treatments in psychiatric institutions, and like the protagonist of the novel, the sister of President Rosemary had received a lobotomy which left his disabled deeply. Kennedy sought to end “dependence on the cold mercy of guardian isolation”, he said in a declaration at the Congress.
Dedication to improving the country’s approach to mental health has become a family project. In 1962, Eunice Kennedy Shriver launched a sports camp for people with intellectual disabilities, which became the special Olympic Games. In the 1970s, senator Edward Kennedy tried to fix living conditions in psychiatric institutions; In the 90s, he helped establish Administration of drug addiction and mental health services. Recently, his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary for Health and Social Services, has survived this agency in a new one: the administration of a healthy America, which includes mental health as one of its objectives.
The political plans of RFK Jr. have not yet taken shape. So far, he has supervised deep cuts in HHS and has started to reorganize the agency internally. He met once, would haveIn private with the Make America Healthy Again commission, created by the president to solve chronic health problems; One of his declared objectives is to assess the threat of prescription psychiatric drugs. (HHS did not respond to a request for comments.) When speaking publicly, Kennedy returned several times to the idea that American doctors excrete such drugs.
Kennedy is clever to take over the frustrations in the Zeitgeist. The feeling according to which doctors are too high on psychiatric drugs, while neglecting the side effects or in difficulty of the narrowing doses, has received more attention from the public. A coherent and affordable access to therapists, or in economic support and housing, is difficult to find. However, insofar as RFK Jr. revealed his own reflection on how to respond to these complaints, his suggestions remain isolated from robust debates on the treatment of mental health. His clearest proposal is always his campaign promise to create well-being farms where Americans returned to soil and “would learn the discipline of hard work”. This idea is hardly more than a retirement to well -extinct calls to fight against mental distress by apparently natural means, and shows some interest in the nuances of the debate on psychiatric drugs, or the ways in which the separation of people of society for such healing has failed.
Kennedy first mentioned well-being farms during his presidential race, and when he painted a painting of pastoral Mecca for having treated dependence, he joined a tradition that dates back more than 200 years. Retirement, founded in England at the end of the 18th century by a quaker, William Tuke, who, with French doctor Phillipe, is considered a father of “moral treatment”, an effort to create human hospitals. Instead of bodily chains and punishment, retirement provided a majestic country house, with hectares of land to take care of cows and grow food. Doctor Benjamin Rush – who signed the declaration of independence – was inspired by moral treatment and wrote in 1812 that men who “help cutting wood, fires and digs in a garden, and women who are used in washing, ironing and cleaning floors, are often recovered”, while those who do not do manual work do not.
Tuke and Pinel thought that agriculture was particularly useful, and many early asylums in the United States employed a component “work as therapy”, explains Neil Gong, sociologist at UC San Diego. At the time, these institutions were peak, and those who directed them thought that the “crazy” did not have to be locked in chains to improve. “Psychiatric hospitals began in the 19th century with very utopian expectations around them and their ability to heal,” explains Andrew Scull, sociologist and author of Desperate remedies: the turbulent quest for psychiatry to cure mental illness. At the end of the 19th century, each state had at least one institution funded by the government.
But when moral treatment was generalized to larger populations, it collapsed. (The retirement has been designed to face only 30 patients.) Over time, the asylums managed by the government were overwhelmed by cases and severely by abuse. At the level, the institutions “quickly decreased in warehouses where many unpleasant things happen to patients and where patients tended to get lost,” said Scull.
The inclusion of agriculture has also not protected against such problems either. Fort Worth Narcotic Farm, a project funded by the federal government opened in 1938, promised To mix honest agricultural work with the recovery of drug addiction. According to a 1957 study, 25% of patients, a study, held their treatment plan, and most people treated in federal farms of narcotics, according to a 1957 study, used drugs after their departure. The American narcotics farm, which opened in 1935, was the temporary home of many famous jazz musicians, including Chet Baker. But once people left the farm, the majority – 90%, was linked. He closed in 1976 after a survey of the Congress led by Senator Ted Kennedy found that doctors tested experimental drugs on the people who live there and sometimes gave drugs to patients such as heroine and cocaine as a reward.
The idea of farm -based detoxification is attractive enough for today, many private rehabilitation centers integrate nature and agriculture; The pastoral work of mental health treatment has become a luxury good, told me Gong, but is often combined with a series of other services, including psychiatric support. However, there is no overwhelming evidence that care farms have already been effective in improving results. A 2019 review find No evidence that “care farms have improved the quality of life of people” and limited evidence of improving depression and anxiety. “To defend the well-being farm, seems out of the left field when other models such as permanent support accommodation or a job of support have a huge basis for evidence, including profitability,” said Ryan K. McBain, health economist at the Rand Corporation. If Kennedy wanted it, he could use the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, which assesses new programs, to assess the effectiveness of a well-being farm managed by the State. This month, however, CMMI announcement that it reduces the financing of several of its programs.
The most revealing aspect of Kennedy’s plan is not what people would do on these farms, but what they would not – take a kind of psychiatric drug. By describing the farms, Kennedy painted a table like detoxification centers where people also reduce drugs for depression and ADHD. In moral treatment times, drugs such as antidepressants and ritalin did not exist; Moral treatment was nevertheless considered to be alternatives to barbaric interventions such as bleeding and restraint. For Kennedy, the well-being farm is the same: a substitute for, not a complement to other treatments.
The role that psychiatric drugs play in the treatment of mental health of Americans is a real and active debate. For many people, psychiatric drugs can be a crucial part of their recovery. However, contemporary psychiatrists have a lot complaints on insurance companies that reimburse more for medicines than for other treatments and a pharmaceutical industry screen conflicts of interest. In 2025, people working in this area recognize that the ways in which drugs have pretended to treat Mental disease has Simplified outside Or overestimated biology. The deliberations on the origin and the legitimate reaction to mental distress are essential to psychiatry: Michel Foucault thought that psychiatry could be a pernicious force to control society; Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz thought that mental illness was completely a myth.
However, Kennedy suddenly engaged in any of these subjects. Instead, he scraped the water with false complaints, including that antidepressants are associated with school shots and are more addictive than heroin. In a podcast last year, he declared that well-being farms without psychiatric drugs would be particularly useful for black children: “Each black kid is now standard on Adderall, on Isers, Benzos, who are known to induce violence, and these children will have a chance to go somewhere and to repress themselves.”
In this way, Kennedy’s proposal for well -being shows how his reflection on public health is defined almost entirely through it of naturalness – that “natural” treatments are always better, and that manual work and fresh air, or simply good diet, could solve complex and spread health problems. (“They will cultivate their own food, organic foods, high quality foods, as many behavioral problems are linked to food”, Kennedy said About farms.) This is in accordance with his ideas on vaccination – this natural exposure to the disease could be desirable, and that what deals with diseases such as measles with food and sanitation, as the country did in the first half of the 20th century, is preferable.
But we have learned a lot in the past 50 years, if not 200 years. The facilities that remove people from their community have a limited capacity, for themselves, an effective public health measure. A more radical idea than well-being farms would be to treat people in their community, with a mixture of care options from which they can choose. This idea is also closer to what John F. Kennedy had in mind when he signed the community mental Health Act in 1963. He did not just want to close the mental centers managed by the government; He was aimed at creating 1,500 community mental health centers. This objective has not been achieved. Community mental health care gives a person access to an interdisciplinary team for managing social workers, nurses, doctors and psychologists, and social services such as housing and employment support. Creating this on a scale presents a more obvious and more necessary challenge than sending people back to a farm to breathe fresh air and up to earth.