Make America Healthy Again - Weaponising Mental Health Against The Homeless And The Poor

‘Make America healthy again’ is Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s mantra as Donald Trump’s secretary of health. And just as well, given that America is getting unhealthier by the day. A key concern for RFK is America’s mental health. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the policies being posited by Kennedy, a man who described people on antidepressants as ‘addicts’ and claimed that they were more addictive than heroin, leave a lot to be desired.

‘Wellness farms’ is a term you will often see Kennedy use; it refers to the archaic idea of farm work being a form of natural therapy. This idea has been tested before, with farm camps aiming to help people overcome addiction being a major theme of the pre-war era. These were famously unsuccessful, with the majority of attendees using after their departure from the camp. But RFK wants to open these camps en masse. Like with all of this administration’s policies, this policy is steeped in racism, with a particular focus on sending young Black Americans taking SSRIs. “Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented.” There we have America’s secretary of health advocating sending young Black Americans to labour camps. Despite soaring rates of mental health issues across America, Trump has taken a chainsaw approach to community mental health services. This includes suicide-prevention lines for young LGBTQ+ Americans, who are among the most affected. Rolling back Medicaid, other assurances, and anti-drug programmes also places more Americans in jeopardy, naturally leading to worsening mental health. 

Without economic reform which sadly looks unlikely in my lifetime, late-stage capitalist America’s mental health crisis will only get worse. Poverty looms large over the majority of Americans, due to the country’s extraordinary wealth inequality. The only way to end this mental health crisis would be to end the rule of the ultra-wealthy over, the very thing Donald Trump represents more than anything. This is why he, with the appointment of Kennedy, has embraced old-fashioned and scientifically unfounded ideas about health, physical and mental. Trump appears to be taking inspiration from his friend and fellow fascist Jair Bolsonaro, who destroyed Brazil’s functional mental healthcare system. He replaced it with work camps similar to the proposed ‘wellness farms.’ Prevalent in these camps were violence, religious propaganda, and forced, unpaid labour. Fascists like Trump and Bolsonaro tend to oppose modern psychiatric practices as a means to advance privatisation and mental health courses, but as well as this, in Trump’s case, it appears to represent something even more sinister. 

In late July, Trump passed an order entitled ‘ending crime and disorder on America’s streets.’ This order may be the most overtly fascist of his presidency so far. Trump has regularly parroted the figure that last year under Biden there were 274,224 people on America’s streets in a night, the highest figure ever recorded. In this order Trump lays out his plan to address this, which is essentially to forcibly incarcerate America’s homeless. It encourages states to introduce prohibitions on open drug use and squatting. By encouraging the criminalisation of these behaviours, Donald Trump is making an excuse to put homeless people in prison, and ostensibly bringing an ‘end to disorder on America’s streets.’ But what does this have to do with mental health? In the order, it is stated that ‘the overwhelming majority of these people are addicted to drugs, have a mental health disorder, or both.’ This is not true. A report by KFF states that 26% of America’s homeless suffer from a serious mental illness, and the same proportion have a substance abuse issue, with the two often overlapping. The homeless are not mentally ill as President Trump would have us believe, they are merely the victims of a failed capitalist system. With the amount of wealth in America, it is outrageous that even one person shouldn’t have a roof over their head. By suggesting that the ‘overwhelming majority’ of America’s homeless could benefit from psychiatric treatment, Trump is using his mental health policies, such as RFK’s wellness camps, as a way to deal with the homelessness crisis. Throughout the order, the word ‘treatment’ is mentioned 10 times. This should tell us enough about what America’s ruling class thinks of the poor, as though poverty is some kind of sickness which needs to be removed from the streets. The order is essentially giving the police an excuse to arrest the homeless, so that Trump can take credit for supposedly cleaning up America’s streets, despite having only worsened the root causes.

Trump is weaponising mental health in order to make his America look better, while all he is doing is making apparent his disdain for the poor. This order sets a frightening precedent, never before has America been so overt in its hatred of its poorest citizens, and if he is allowed to get away with this, it will show just how little he cares America’s mental health and its poverty.

Illustrations: Will Allen/Europinion