MAHA Mental Health Push Coincides With NIH, SNAP Cuts
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- Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a psychiatric deprescribing action plan at a May MAHA Institute summit, directing SAMHSA to study prescribing trends, clarifying Medicare payment for tapering, and convening a technical expert panel over the summer.
- The National Institutes of Health terminated hundreds of active grants in early 2025, with the National Institute of Mental Health losing more grants than any other NIH institute.
- The One Big Beautiful Bill has already cost more than 700,000 children in 12 states their SNAP benefits since becoming law, undercutting the nutrition-based mental health narrative MAHA promotes.
- The proposed 2027 budget would slash WIC benefits from $52 to $13 per month for breastfeeding mothers and from $26 to $10 per month for young children.
- Congress has so far resisted the deepest proposed cuts, keeping SAMHSA intact and rejecting the administration's proposed ~40% NIH cut — though the author warns that resistance is not guaranteed.
- A proposed FDA black-box warning on SSRIs in pregnancy, floated in 2025, echoes the 2004 adolescent warning that was followed by a sharp drop in prescribing, illustrating how 'friction at enough system points' could make staying on treatment harder without banning any drug.
- Antipsychotic discontinuation in schizophrenia carries steep relapse risk, and lithium remains one of the few treatments in all of medicine shown to reduce suicide — making sweeping deprescribing guidance a clinical hazard for the patients who would absorb the gap.
Why it matters: Patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and treatment-resistant depression — for whom ongoing medication prevents relapse, hospitalization, and death — are the ones who would absorb the gap if 'deprescribing' becomes federal default, while the 700,000+ children now losing SNAP benefits are precisely the population the MAHA 'nutrition fixes mental health' narrative claims to help.
