Dear Mr. Kennedy

Dear Mr. Kennedy,

I write to you today not merely with concern, but with alarm about a catastrophic weakening of the American spirit—a deliberate and systematic dismantling of human resilience that threatens the very soul of our nation. Throughout my career, I have witnessed the transformation of a once-resilient population into a fragile mass of perpetual patients, a metamorphosis so profound it can only be described as an attack on human nature itself. What we face is not simply a mental health crisis—it is an orchestrated assault on our capacity to remain human in an increasingly anti-human world.

The deterioration of mental fortitude in our population has accelerated at a terrifying pace over the past decade, but this is no accident of history or unfortunate societal trend. We are witnessing the fruits of a calculated campaign to convert human strength into dependency, natural resilience into perpetual vulnerability, and normal human suffering into profitable chronic conditions. This letter serves as both a warning and an indictment of a system that has betrayed the American people under the guise of helping them.

The malaise spreading through our society operates like a virus—one that has infected every institution meant to support human flourishing. This contagion flows through our media channels, saturates our educational system, corrupts our healthcare institutions, and spreads through an interlocking network of self-appointed authorities: academics in their ivory towers, public health experts issuing edicts from afar, pharmaceutical companies flooding our screens with promises of chemical salvation, politicians leveraging our fears for power, mental health specialists pathologizing normal human experiences, and social service providers who have become unwitting agents of dependency.

Many will attempt to isolate the cause, pointing to the obvious symptoms of our decline: the epidemic of social media addiction, the surge in chronic health conditions, the deepening political divisions, the rise of ideological extremes, woke ideology, or any number of modern afflictions. But these are merely surface manifestations—individual fever spikes of a deeper systemic disease eating away at our cultural immune system.

At its core, we face an anti-humanistic paradigm so insidious that it strikes at the very foundation of what makes us human—a calculated system that operates through the cultivation of fear, transforming this primal emotion from a teacher into a prison warden. This manufactured fear has become the architect of our collective paralysis, a force more potent than any physical chains.

It severs us not only from our spirit and higher callings but from the sacred trinity that defines our humanity: our connection to each other, our relationship with the divine, and our natural state of resilience. This orchestrated disconnection is no accident—it is a deliberate dismantling of human potential, designed to replace our innate wisdom with external authority, our spiritual sovereignty with dependency, and our natural resilience with perpetual vulnerability. In this state of enforced fragmentation, we become strangers not only to each other but to ourselves, unable to access the wellspring of strength that has sustained human beings through millennia of challenges.

We have devolved into a society drowning in perpetual anxiety—a culture so suffocated by fear that it has forgotten how to breathe. We are conditioned to fear disease in every sniffle, to see threat in every stranger, to recoil from the natural rhythm of life and death itself. Most tragically, we have been taught to fear the very essence of our humanity: our raw emotions that signal wisdom, our thoughts that spark creation, and the sacred struggles that have forged human character since time immemorial. We have created a paradox where the very experiences that make us fully human—grief, love, conflict, triumph, loss—have been transformed into pathologies to be eliminated rather than gateways to be traversed.

These ancient challenges that once served as initiations into deeper understanding now trigger only retreat and medication. Where our ancestors found meaning in confronting life's difficulties, we seek escape. Where they discovered strength in vulnerability, we find only weakness to be medicated. Where they built bonds through shared trials, we isolate in individual treatment plans.

Our innate wisdom—that ancient well of human knowledge carried in our DNA and whispered through generations—is being systematically hijacked by a tyranny of credentialed authorities. We witness the parade of white coats and degrees: physicians who silence the soul's sacred call with prescriptions, therapists who transform every human tear into pathology, and self-proclaimed experts who have crowned themselves the new priests of human experience. Their credentials have become their scripture, their diagnostic manuals their holy books, and their prescription pads the new confessional.

Their message pounds like a hammer on the human spirit: you are weak, you are broken, you are mentally ill. You cannot trust your own mind, your own heart, your own soul. Every tear you shed is depression, every worry anxiety, every human reaction a symptom of disease.

They have created a masterpiece of manipulation—a doctrine of dependency so complete that we now willingly surrender our humanity at the altar of their expertise. This isn't just a perversion of human experience; it is a deliberate decimation of human sovereignty, a calculated campaign to convert human beings into patients, citizens into cases, and natural human suffering into profitable chronic conditions.

When we encounter the inevitable crucibles that have forged human character since time immemorial—loss that tears open the heart, the ache of betrayal, the uncertainty that precedes transformation, the conflict that births wisdom—these sacred rites of passage are no longer recognized as the essential catalysts for spiritual evolution they have always been. Instead, they are hastily condemned as symptoms of mental illness, branded with diagnostic codes, and suffocated with pharmaceuticals. What our ancestors understood as the soul's necessary journey through darkness toward light—the eternal dance of death and rebirth that gives life its meaning—has been reduced to a sterile diagnosis of chemical imbalance requiring chemical correction.

The deliberate nature of this attack on human consciousness is evident in how systematically we are taught to flee from transformative darkness. We are conditioned to reach for pills at the first shadow of discomfort—psychiatric drugs, sleeping pills, anxiety medications, antidepressants, street drugs, alcohol—anything to avoid the sacred darkness where true transformation awaits.

This is no accident.

A population too sedated to feel its pain is too numb to recognize its chains. Those who profit from human dependency understand a fundamental truth: prevent people from facing their darkness, and you prevent them from finding their light.

What we call "mental illness" has become a self-fulfilling prophecy—an idea so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness that it shapes the very reality it claims to describe. We have created a perfect circle of fear: we fear mental illness, and that very fear generates the distress we then label as illness. This collective belief system transforms natural human responses—anxiety, sadness, confusion, anger—into symptoms of pathology, creating a lens through which we view all human experience as potentially diseased.

Like a person convinced they are physically ill who then manifests symptoms through the power of belief, our society's obsession with mental illness has created a population that increasingly fits its own diagnostic criteria. The more we fear these conditions, the more we see them everywhere, and the more we see them, the more we fear them. This circular pattern has become so entrenched in our cultural narrative that we can no longer distinguish between genuine human suffering and the suffering we create through our fear of suffering itself. We have created a maze of mirrors where every reflection confirms our worst fears, and every confirmation deepens our conviction that we are fundamentally broken.

Most chilling is our society's reflexive reach for the prescription pad—our pavlovian response to human suffering. A staggering quarter of our population now depends on psychiatric drugs, their natural emotional responses dulled by chemicals, while an ever-expanding therapy industry profits not from facilitating genuine healing, but from maintaining an endless cycle of dependency. We have created a medical apparatus that transforms life's teachers into enemies to be eliminated, converting every moment of spiritual crisis into a diagnosis requiring chemical intervention.

The pharmaceuticals we dispense have become more than mere bandages—they are blindfolds placed over our spiritual eyes, treating what we've labeled as 'symptoms' while deliberately ignoring the soul's desperate call for transformation. In the most perverse of ironies, we have reached a point where people fear their own fear, trapped in an endless cycle of medicating away the very experiences designed to set them free. Each moment of anxiety, each wave of depression, each instance of emotional turbulence—rather than being recognized as invitations to deeper understanding and growth—becomes another reason to increase the dose, adjust the prescription, add another medication to the regiment.

Is it any wonder that our population crumbles at the mere whisper of discomfort, when we have systematically stripped away the very experiences that build resilience?This orchestrated assault on human resilience has bred a generation of unprecedented fragility—where mere disagreement is experienced as violence, where different viewpoints are processed as trauma, and where the slightest offense becomes catastrophic to the self.

This is no accident, but rather the predictable outcome of a deliberate programming that begins in our schools, where children are taught to fear their own emotional responses; is reinforced by therapists who have become unwitting agents of learned helplessness; and is cemented by medical professionals whose education has been captured by pharmaceutical interests.

Perhaps most heartbreaking is how this system has severed the sacred bond between parent and child—replacing ancestral wisdom with diagnostic manuals, and parental intuition with psychiatric prescriptions. Today's parents, already drowning in their own programmed fears, no longer trust the very love that nature embedded within them as a compass for raising their children. Instead, they anxiously scrutinize every childhood emotion, every developmental stage, every natural rebellion against authority as potential symptoms of mental illness requiring professional intervention.

A child's sadness becomes depression, their energy becomes ADHD, their defiance becomes oppositional defiant disorder. Terrified of making a mistake, parents surrender their divine right of guidance to an army of mental health professionals who reduce the sacred art of child-rearing to a series of clinical protocols and chemical interventions.

The result is a generational tragedy: children learn not to trust their own emotions, parents learn not to trust their own instincts, and the profound wisdom that once flowed from generation to generation through the channel of parental love is replaced by a sterile professional expertise that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is how we create a legacy of weakness—by teaching parents to fear their own children's humanity and to doubt their own capacity to nurture it.

The result is a perpetual victim mindset so profound that it renders individuals helpless before any perceived slight or challenge. We have created a perverse educational and medical assembly line that systematically strips people of their innate capacity to tolerate discomfort, regulate stress, and emerge stronger through life's inevitable challenges.

Every institution that should strengthen human character has been corrupted into a factory of fragility—converting natural human resilience into a state of permanent vulnerability, all while calling this transformation "progress," "mental health awareness," and "emotional safety." This mass production of weakness serves those who profit from dependency, as each new generation becomes more easily offended, more readily traumatized, and more desperately dependent on the very systems that created their fragility in the first place.

The question before us is stark and unavoidable: Can we truly restore American health and vitality without confronting the systematic assault on human resilience itself?

We stand at a crossroads where we must summon the courage to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: the very essence of being human has been under attack, and this attack has been sanctioned and supported by our own government institutions. Under the banner of scientific progress, we have allowed the mass experimentation on American minds through chemical compounds that fundamentally alter human consciousness and emotional processing.

This unprecedented chemical assault on human consciousness has been marketed to us as "safe and effective treatment," wrapped in the pristine authority of medical science while concealing a devastating truth: millions of Americans have been transformed into unwitting subjects in a mass neurological experiment.

The evidence of harm is not just mounting—it is screaming from the wreckage of countless lives shattered by the very system they turned to for help. I speak for the millions who trusted their doctors, believed in the science, and now find themselves trapped in a chemical straightjacket of dependency, their bodies ravaged by metabolic disorders, their minds clouded by cognitive dysfunction, their spirits broken by a system that promised healing but delivered perpetual patienthood.

These are not merely statistics—they are our brothers and sisters, our children, our friends who walked into clinics seeking support through life's natural struggles and emerged with prescriptions that would forever alter their brain chemistry. They were told their suffering was a chemical imbalance rather than a normal response to trauma. They were promised safety and efficacy while the pharmaceutical industry buried studies showing otherwise. They were handed pills instead of understanding, diagnoses instead of wisdom, and when the medications caused new problems, they were given more medications in an endless cascade of iatrogenic harm—all while being told this was the best that modern medicine could offer.

We have been sold a profound lie: that the safest and most effective response to emotional struggle is to chemically alter the very brain functions that make us human. This is not progress—it is a betrayal of our fundamental nature, executed with the full backing of regulatory agencies and public health institutions. The time has come to confront this betrayal and ask: Who benefits from a population too medicated to trust their own internal signals? Who profits from converting human strength into chemical dependency? What power is served by teaching Americans to fear and medicate away their own humanity?

The question before us, Mr. Kennedy, is stark:

Will we continue to sedate a nation while calling it treatment?

Will we admit that our mental health system has become an instrument of oppression rather than healing?

A quarter of our population now depends on psychiatric drugs, while an entire generation has been taught to fear their own humanity. Our ancestors faced wars, famines, and depressions without chemical intervention—they grew stronger through struggle, not by numbing it. Yet, even in this darkened landscape, there remains an inextinguishable truth: love is more powerful than fear.

No amount of medication can suppress the human spirit's yearning for authentic connection and meaning. The choice is clear: continue profiting from manufactured human weakness, or dare to rebuild a society that honors our natural resilience. When we choose love over fear, trust over suspicion, and courage over comfort, we will find our way back to our innate wisdom. History will judge harshly those who witnessed this systematic destruction of human nature and chose to look away. The time to act is now.

Sincerely,

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP

Clinical Psychologist