Gen Z is finally waking up and realizing that they were mass-prescribed antidepressants without much consideration for the long-term side effects.
Among them is Ella Emhoff, the 26-year-old stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, who recently took to TikTok to express concern that she’s having difficulty coming off of SSRIs herself.
“I’ve been on SSRIs for over a decade, almost 15 years probably, and [now researchers are] calling out the lack of research on long-term use of these things,” she said to her 60,000-plus followers.
That means Emhoff was around 11 years old when she started taking the drugs, which are prescribed to treat depression and anxiety.
A full 16.5% of Americans aged 18 to 24 — more than 5 million young people — are taking antidepressants,according to a 2025 surveypublished in the BMJ Mental Health journal.
Another study, from the American Academy of Pediatrics, found the rate of prescriptions dispensed for 12- to 25-year-oldssurged by two-thirdsfrom 2016 to 2022.
The fact that Emhoff, a far-left Mamdani supporter and pro-Palestine activist, is sounding a lot like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when it comes to drug overprescription says a lot.
It’s a sign that young people of all political persuasions are beginning to question whether being on psychiatric drugs for more than half of their lives was actually a good choice — or a way of treating the symptom, and not the cause, of youth malaise.
In the December TikTok video, which took off like wildfireon Xjust this week, Emhoff films herself while listening to a Wall Street Journal podcast,presumably from December 3, which asks the question: “Is America overmedicated?”
It reports that “long-term use was never studied” and that patients are staying on psychiatric drugs much longer than they were intended, while the effects of this prolonged usage have not been studied.
Source: Drudge Report
