RFK Jr., Wisner Baum, and the War on Antidepressants

Every prescribing decision involves tradeoffs, and legitimate clinical debate exists about psychiatric medication use in children. But when the nation's top health official is shaping federal prescribing policy while receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a law firm that profits from suing the makers of the very drugs targeted by that policy, the arrangement deserves scrutiny regardless of where anyone lands on the underlying science.

The Policy: MAHA's Anti-SSRI Push

On May 4, 2026, HHS announced its “Action Plan to Curb Psychiatric Overprescribing” at a MAHA Institute summit on mental health and “overmedicalization.” Kennedy, as closing speaker, laid out a plan to promote “appropriate psychiatric prescribing” and drive deprescribing “when clinically indicated.”

At the summit, an Inner Compass Initiative representative noted that roughly 65 million Americans, including 4 million children, currently take some form of psychiatric medication.

The Money: Wisner Baum

Kennedy's financial ties to Wisner Baum predate his HHS appointment and were a flashpoint at his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren stated Kennedy had collected roughly $2.5 million from the firm over the prior two years, tied primarily to litigation against Merck over the Gardasil HPV vaccine. In a separate ethics disclosure, Kennedy reported at least $857,000 in fees from Wisner Baum without specifying which cases generated the income.

Wisner Baum told reporters Kennedy was compensated only for non-vaccine-related cases. Under questioning, Kennedy said he would take one final payment from the firm for government-related work and, going forward, would direct future fees elsewhere rather than collect them directly.

The firm has separately spent years pursuing litigation against manufacturers of antidepressants and of the devices used to deliver electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

The Scientology Connection

Wisner Baum's two senior partners, Brent Wisner and Michael Baum, have documented links to the Church of Scientology. Wisner has appeared in a documentary produced by CCHR. Baum's name appears in evidence from a 1970s criminal case connected to Scientology's “Snow White Program,” a large-scale infiltration of U.S. government agencies; reporting describes him as an unindicted co-conspirator in that matter. The Daily Beast, which first reported on the partners' Scientology ties, said it could not independently confirm formal church membership for either man.

CCHR has campaigned against psychiatric medication, and specifically SSRIs, since the 1970s, rooted in L. Ron Hubbard's rejection of psychiatry. The substantive overlap between CCHR's decades-old talking points and the MAHA Action Plan's framing of SSRIs is what prompted UK-based physician and researcher Edzard Ernst to write about the connection on his blog in July 2026.

A note on framing: coverage of this story (including Ernst's own piece) has used “Is RFK Jr. a Scientologist?” as a headline hook. The honest answer, on current public evidence, is no. The documented facts are about financial conflict of interest and ideological overlap — which stand on their own without the membership claim.