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 survey published 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-olds surged by two-thirds from 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 wildfire on X just 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.
Emhoff said on TikTok the podcast’s conversation about how difficult it is to get off the drugs “got me thinking how little I’ve thought about that, naively, obviously,” adding that it isn’t being talked about.
“Every time I’ve gone off of it for a week or missed it for whatever reason, like, it has been really hard for me, and I’ve had a really hard time,” Emhoff explained.
It’s a sad revelation for someone who, while in just fifth or sixth grade, has doctors and parents who signed off on a prescription that may turn out to be a mistake.
Emhoff has a strange bedfellow in her realization: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is taking on the exact issue that she is concerned about.
“Too many patients begin treatment without a clear understanding of the risks, and how long they will stay on these drugs, or how to come off them,” the Secretary of Health and Human Services said at a Make America Healthy Again Institute event on Monday.
He pledged also that, “We are going to fix it.” Kennedy’s department will encourage non-drug interventions for mental health issues and pursue reforms that would allow doctors to be paid to help people get off psychiatric drugs, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The full extent of side effects of stopping SSRIs is still not totally known, but some former SSRI users report that they experience emotional numbness, as well as even sexual disorders, after coming off the drugs.
Nick, a 27-year-old who lives in New England, began experiencing erectile dysfunction after going off antidepressants, apparently due to a newly recognized condition called Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD).
“That region feels as sensitive as the skin on the back of my elbow does,” Nick told The Post.
“Now there’s just no enjoyment in anything, like hobbies, or hanging out with my girlfriend, or watching a movie, or playing video games, my favorite thing to do, it’s all exactly the same. It’s like watching a brick wall,” he said.
Our society has been stripped of community, religious faith and patriotism. In its place, people have been given screens, influencers, dating apps, online porn, AI companions and all manner of unsatisfactory replacements.
Could that be why so many Gen Zers feel they need quick-fix psychiatric medications? And could trying something else first — therapy, getting off social media, exercise — be a better answer for some of them?
“I think I definitely should have [done] therapy first and foremost,” Nick admitted, adding that, when he was 19 and started taking an SSRI, “I wasn’t at risk of taking my own life or anything like that … I still had a hell of a lot of fun in life.”
