On May 4, 2026, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before the Make America Health Again (MAHA) Institute’s Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit and announced what he described as “clear and decisive action” to confront America’s mental health crisis—by targeting the overuse of psychiatric medications.

“Today, we take clear and decisive action to confront our nation’s mental health crisis by addressing the overuse of psychiatric medications—especially among children,” Kennedy said.

“We will support patient autonomy, require informed consent and shared decision-making, and shift the standard of care toward prevention, transparency, and a more holistic approach to mental health.”

At first glance, this sounds reasonable—even overdue.

There are legitimate concerns about psychiatric polypharmacy, premature escalation, and poorly monitored long-term prescribing. I understand why this message resonates.

Americans sense—correctly—that something has gone very, very wrong with mental health care in this country.

And the data suggest they are right about that.

Rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, overdose, burnout, suicide, and psychological distress continue to climb—even as psychiatric medication use has expanded dramatically over the last several decades.

To many, this looks like proof that psychiatric treatment itself has failed.

But what I have witnessed in clinical practice—and what the research more carefully shows—is that this is not simply a problem of “overprescribing.”

It is a far more uncomfortable reality.

What we are seeing is the slow collapse of a mental health care system that no longer creates the conditions necessary for careful diagnosis, thoughtful sequencing of treatment, longitudinal monitoring, or sustained therapeutic relationships between doctor and patient.

And if we accept the MAHA framing—and its deceptively simple solution of incentivizing clinicians to deprescribe—we risk doing three things at once:

• harming the patients who depend on these medications

• leaving the system that produced this problem completely intact

• and calling it reform

So before we act, we need to understand what is actually going wrong.

So let’s talk about it.

What the Evidence Actually Shows — and What It Doesn’t

Let’s start with the data itself, because it is worth taking seriously on its own terms.

In one widely cited study, researchers analyzed psychotropic prescribing patterns among 5.1 million recipients in a private insurance database and found that a substantial proportion of psychotropic prescriptions (medications that affect the mind, emotions, behavior, and mental activity) were given to patients without a formally documented psychiatric diagnosis associated with the visit.

Depending on the medication class:

• 42% of antidepressant visits

• 58% of stimulant visits

• 65% of anxiolytic and sedative visits

occurred without an associated psychiatric diagnosis.

Another analysis of the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey found that roughly 60% of new psychotropic prescriptions were initiated without any documented psychiatric diagnosis.

A separate study examining outpatient anti-depressant prescribing trends from 1996 to 2007 found that the proportion of antidepressants prescribed without a documented psychiatric diagnosis increased from 59.5% to 72.7%.

And among patients with newly diagnosed depressive episodes, approximately 14% started an antipsychotic within one year. Of those prescribed antipsychotics for non-psychotic depression, 71% had not first received minimally adequate antidepressant treatment. This suggest pre-mature escalation to a drug class with substantial metabolic and neurologic risks.

If you stop reading there, “overprescribing” sounds like a reasonable conclusion.

But if you look more closely, a different picture emerges.

What these studies actually describe is not simply “too many medications.” They describe 1) medications prescribed without diagnostic clarity, 2) escalated without adequate follow-up, and 3) continued without meaningful reassessment.

That is a fundamentally different problem.

And it demands a fundamentally different solution than the one currently being offered by Secretary Kennedy. and the MAHA movement.

Importantly, none of this means psychiatric medications are inherently illegitimate or unnecessary. Severe depression, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, OCD, PTSD, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric illnesses can be profoundly disabling — and at times life-threatening. Psychiatric medications absolutely help many patients.

The problem is not that psychiatric medications exist.

The problem is that our system uses medications to compensate for inadequate visit length and the collapse of continuity, therapy and psychiatrist access, social support and long-term care.

If this were simply a problem of overuse, the solution would be straightforward: prescribe less.

But if medications are being used to compensate for gaps in care, then the question is no longer simply how much we prescribe—but how and why we prescribe at all.

When you look closely at the literature—and at the reality of clinical practice—a pattern begins to emerge. Not a single failure, but a system of failures.

They are distinct. They are interconnected. And together, they reveal the deeper architecture of what has gone wrong.

The 3 Failures Fueling the Prescription Crisis in Psychiatric Care

The literature, in my view, reveals three distinct but interconnected failures.

• Failure of indication

• Failure of sequencing

• Failure of monitoring

Each one matters separately.

And each one points toward a much deeper structural crisis inside American medicine.

Let’s dig into these.

Failure #1: Indication Failure

The reality is that a striking proportion of psychotropic prescriptions occur without clearly documented psychiatric diagnoses.

But that does not necessarily mean physicians are acting recklessly.

It often means clinicians are practicing inside systems that no longer create the conditions necessary for diagnostic clarity.

Let me explain.

Unlike diagnosing pneumonia, diabetes, or a fracture, psychiatric diagnosis rarely offers clean biological boundaries. Clinicians are often working with overlapping symptom clusters, incomplete histories, trauma narratives, sleep disruption, substance use, chronic stress, relational instability, and social suffering — all compressed into brief clinical encounters.

In practice, it means we’re often treating symptoms as they show up, rather than treating a clearly defined condition from the start. Or that we’re starting a medication, watching how the patient responds, and then tweaking things—rather than working from a fully defined diagnosis for the start.

Here’s an example.

Let’s take two common psychiatric diagnoses: major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

From both the patient’s and clinician’s perspective, these conditions share extensive symptom overlap:

• fatigue

• insomnia

• difficulty concentrating

• irritability

• psychomotor agitation

—all of these symptoms appear in both diagnostic frameworks.

To complicate matters further, they also co-occur (exist at the same time in one person) at extremely high rates. Roughly 60% of patients with generalized anxiety disorder also meet criteria for major depressive disorder.

In a busy primary care clinic, they are frequently difficult to disentangle.

In that setting, the diagnostic distinction may not be carefully made — or carefully documented — yet an SSRI is prescribed anyway because it is considered first-line treatment for both.

Clinicians, particularly in primary care, often respond with the only intervention that fits inside the time they are given.

In those situations, the antidepressant is more a “hypothesis” than a fully developed treatment plan.

Sometimes that hypothesis is correct.

Often, the patient doesn’t take the medicine long enough or stay connected to care long enough, to know.

Failure #2: Sequencing Failure

In medicine, sequence matters.

We are trained to move carefully through escalating levels of intervention:

1. Start with the safest and most evidence-based first-line treatment.

2. Give it adequate time.

3. Reassess the response.

4. Only then escalate treatment if necessary.

This approach exists for a reason.

Every escalation in treatment exposes patients to greater complexity, greater side effect burden, and greater risk.

But in the real world of American mental health care, this sequence often collapses.

The data increasingly suggests that clinicians escalate too quickly to higher-risk psychiatric interventions.

But what appears on the surface as poor prescribing behavior often reflects something deeper: compressed judgment.

Here is what sequencing failure looks like in practice:

A patient presents with depression. An antidepressant is started. But then…follow-up becomes inconsistent.

The patient misses appointments because of their work schedule, transportation barriers, childcare responsibilities, unstable housing, insurance problems, exhaustion, or simple emotional overwhelm.

Without consistent follow-up, the clinician loses the ability to:

• optimize the dose

• monitor side effects

• assess adherence

• evaluate therapeutic response

• or adequately explore the underlying contributors to the patient’s suffering

Let’s say a few months pass and the patient eventually return — and is still struggling.

At that moment, the clinician faces two paths:

1. Stay the course, optimize the first-line treatment, probe more deeply into trauma, sleep, substance use, relationships, and social stressors.

2. Add another medication.

In a healthcare system organized around continuity, time, and therapeutic support, we would more often choose the first.

In the healthcare system we actually have, we frequently choose the second.

Sequencing failure is not simply about poor judgment.

It is about “compressed” judgment.

This is because;

• there is not enough time to titrate carefully

• there is not enough patient access to ensure close follow-up

• there is not enough reimbursement for therapy and behavioral intervention

• there is not enough psychiatric consultation support

• and there is not enough infrastructure to address the nonpharmacologic drivers of suffering

After all, the fifteen-minute visit is the economic unit around which much of American outpatient medicine is organized.

Yet, mental health care requires history-taking, relational trust, nuance, observation, and longitudinal reassessment.

Our system simply does not make time for that kind of medicine. Especially in Primary Care, where most mental health care happens.

In the end, what looks like “too much medication” is ultimately the downstream consequence of too little time, too little continuity, and too little support to do treatment properly.

But there’s one more keyway our system fails.

Failure #3: Monitoring Failure

Psychiatric medications are not supposed to exist in clinical autopilot.

In theory, medications are started carefully, monitored closely, adjusted thoughtfully, and discontinued when risks outweigh benefits.

In reality, many medications are added and stay on to the point of permanence.

This happens for many reasons —Patients frequently move between clinicians and follow-up care fragments. And over time, the original rationale for treatment disappears from the chart.

What began as a temporary intervention slowly evolves into chronic medication burden without anyone deliberately deciding it should.

This is where psychiatric polypharmacy becomes especially concerning.

One longitudinal study found inpatient psychiatric polypharmacy averaging 4.5 medications per patient, with no efficacy advantage over monotherapy but two- to threefold higher rates of adverse drug reactions.

And yet in many settings, we still lack strong systems for:

• evaluating whether treatment is still helping

• de-prescribing when appropriate

• monitoring long-term side effects

In short, we are often far better at starting psychiatric medications than stopping them.

That is not just a “prescribing” problem — it is a problem relating to providing longitudinal care.

What Actually Drives These Failures

These failures do not emerge in isolation.

They are the predictable consequence of how American healthcare is currently organized. Factors include:

1. Psychiatry Access Collapse

Wait times for outpatient psychiatry routinely stretch for months as psychiatric workforce shortages are severe and worsening. Insurance coverage for mental health care remains deeply inadequate despite decades of parity legislation.

As a result, many of the patients most in need of specialized psychiatric evaluation are often the least able to obtain it.

2. Primary Care Has Become the Mental Health System

Primary care physicians increasingly manage depression, anxiety, insomnia, trauma-related symptoms, ADHD, substance use, behavioral crises, and severe psychosocial distress — often simultaneously.

I know this because I lived it for years.

The problem isn’t that primary care physicians treat mental illness —we can and we should.

And given the state of psychiatric access in America, we often must.

The problem is that we are managing conditions of escalating complexity without adequate infrastructure, specialist support, follow-up systems, or time.

It’s a recipe for failure.

3. American Culture and Pharmaceutical Expectations

Finally, there is also a broader cultural reality we rarely discuss honestly.

Americans increasingly expect rapid relief from suffering. And our healthcare system increasingly trains people to expect it.

Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising — legal in only the United States and New Zealand and banned everywhere else on the globe— reinforces the idea that emotional distress is primarily a problem to be rapidly corrected through consumption. Patients enter appointments already primed to believe medication is the obvious answer.

The slower work of therapy, behavior change, social repair, grief processing, trauma recovery, relational healing, or watchful waiting can feel intolerably insufficient by comparison. And clinicians, if nothing else, are trained to respond to suffering.

So we accommodate.

This is not because physicians “don’t care'“ or don’t consider the ethics of whether to prescribe or not. It’s because we are functioning inside a system built around rapid throughput, symptom reduction at any cost, and clinical interventions that can “scale”.

Medication scales.

Longitudinal healing often does not.

The Real Danger of the “Overprescribing” Narrative

This is why I worry about reducing this conversation to the language of “overprescribing.” Because it risks turning what is a structural crisis into an individual moral failure of doctors.

It allows policymakers to blame physicians while leaving untouched:

• our fragmented care systems

• therapy that is inaccessible

• the collapse of the psychiatric workforce

• economic precarity in the general population

• trauma exposure

• social isolation

• and reimbursement structures that reward speed over thoroughness

More importantly, it risks harming patients.

If the public conversation becomes simply “psychiatric medications are overused,” many patients who genuinely benefit from treatment will delay or avoid care altogether.

Yet, some patients absolutely need psychiatric medications. Some medications save lives.

The goal should not be indiscriminate reduction. The goal should be:

• better psychiatry.

• More careful diagnosis.

• Better care sequencing.

• better long-term monitoring.

• More therapy access.

• More time with your doctor

• More social work support

In other words: a healthcare system actually designed around healing rather than throughput.

The Wrong Question

Americans are correct to sense that something has gone deeply wrong in mental health care.

But the central question is not whether doctors prescribe too many psychiatric medications.

The real question is why psychiatric medications have become one of the only scalable responses to emotional suffering in modern American life.

That is a much more difficult question.

Answering it forces us to confront not only the failures of medicine, but the broader collapse of social, economic, relational, and therapeutic infrastructures that once helped human beings survive distress without medicalizing every dimension of it.

A healthcare system built around speed, fragmentation, and pharmaceutical throughput will continue producing the same outcomes even if prescribing rates fall.

And until we rebuild the conditions necessary for longitudinal human care, we will continue mistaking the symptoms of systemic collapse for the disease itself.

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There is a peculiar cruelty in how we speak of hunger in America.

We have constructed an elaborate mythology around poverty—one that insists that suffering must be deserved, that deprivation builds character, that those who accept help are somehow complicit in their own diminishment. Nowhere is this mythology more pernicious than in our national conversation about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, or food stamps.

The rhetoric is familiar, almost ritualistic in its repetition: welfare queens gaming the system, able-bodied adults choosing dependency over work, taxpayer dollars funding irresponsibility. These narratives have a gravity to them, a weight that pulls our national discourse away from what SNAP actually is—a program that literally keeps people alive.

I want to tell you who really receives SNAP benefits, because the distance between perception and reality here is vast enough to swallow whole truths.

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Thirty-nine percent of SNAP recipients are children. Children. Not scheming adults manipulating a system, but young people whose primary transgression is being born into poverty. Another 10 percent are elderly Americans, people who spent decades contributing to a society that now requires them to prove their worthiness to eat. Roughly 20 percent of recipients are individuals with disabilities. The majority of working-age, non-disabled adult recipients are already employed—they work jobs that simply don’t pay enough to cover both rent and food, a choice no one should have to make in the wealthiest nation on earth.

These are not abstractions. Behind every percentage point is a grandmother rationing her medications to afford groceries, a child whose cognitive development suffers from chronic hunger, a parent working two jobs who still cannot fill the refrigerator.

The evidence of SNAP’s efficacy is not anecdotal or sentimental—it is measurable, reproducible, scientific. Dr. Seth Berkowitz and colleagues, writing in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that SNAP participation reduces healthcare expenditures among low-income adults, particularly those managing diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Think about that for a moment: feeding people costs us less than treating the diseases that malnutrition causes. The math is almost insultingly simple, yet we resist it.

The research on children is even more stark. Studies published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and Pediatrics demonstrate that SNAP participation is associated with lower odds of poor health status, reduced developmental risk, and decreased emergency department utilization. Children with access to adequate nutrition are healthier, develop better, and require less acute medical intervention. This should not be surprising, and yet we treat it as though it were some radical proposition.

For older adults and racial minorities—populations that bear disproportionate burdens of diet-related disease—SNAP eligibility is associated with reduced prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, and stroke. When policymakers expanded SNAP benefits, researchers documented improvements in diabetes control and cholesterol.

Food, it turns out, is medicine.

Who knew?

There is something deeply American about our cognitive dissonance here. We claim to value self-sufficiency while structuring an economy that makes it impossible for millions to achieve. We say we care about children while debating whether they deserve to eat. We present ourselves as a Christian nation while requiring the poor to perform constant acts of justification for their hunger.

The mythology we’ve constructed about SNAP serves a purpose, though not a noble one. It allows us to avoid examining the systems that create poverty in the first place—the jobs that don’t pay living wages, the healthcare costs that bankrupt families, the housing markets that price out workers, the educational inequities that limit opportunity. If we can convince ourselves that poverty is a personal failing, we need not interrogate it as a policy choice.

But SNAP is not a handout or an act of charity. It is a recognition of a fundamental truth: that in a society as wealthy as ours, no one should go hungry. It is, quite literally, an investment in human survival and flourishing. Every dollar spent on SNAP generates economic activity. Every child fed is a child who can learn. Every elderly person who can afford groceries is someone who maintains dignity in their final years.

The medical literature I’ve cited here represents thousands of hours of research, millions of data points, peer review by experts across institutions. Research examining diet quality among food-insecure adults confirms that SNAP participation is associated with improved dietary quality and healthier weight status. Moreover, interventions combining financial incentives with nutrition education for SNAP beneficiaries demonstrate the strongest improvements in dietary intake, suggesting that thoughtful program enhancements could amplify these benefits.

It is as close to consensus as we get in social science: SNAP improves health outcomes. It reduces food insecurity. It lowers healthcare costs. It helps vulnerable populations survive and, occasionally, thrive.

Yet we continue to debate it as though these were open questions. We continue to means-test and stigmatize and create bureaucratic obstacles, as though the hungry must prove themselves worthy of eating. We continue to speak of program costs without acknowledging the human costs of going without.

I think often about what it means to live in a nation that has the resources to end hunger but lacks the will. About what it says about us that we can precisely calculate the benefits of feeding people—the reduced emergency room visits, the improved diabetes numbers, the better developmental outcomes—and still argue about whether it’s worth doing.

The architecture of SNAP is invisible to most Americans who don’t need it. They don’t see the difference between a child who eats breakfast and one who doesn’t, between an elderly person who can afford their medications and their meals and one who must choose, between a person with diabetes who can manage their disease through diet and one whose condition deteriorates into crisis.

But that invisibility does not make it less real. The lives saved are not less saved because they are not counted. The suffering prevented is not less prevented because it is not seen.

We have constructed elaborate justifications for letting people go hungry, narratives that comfort us in our indifference. But beneath all the rhetoric and mythology is a simple, stubborn fact: SNAP works. It saves lives.

And in a just society, that would be enough.

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It is midnight in America, and a woman is scrolling.

She is pregnant, restless, and her phone is the lantern she carries into the dark. A headline appears on her screen: “Tylenol in pregnancy may cause autism.” She does not know whether to keep scrolling or to stop. She does not know whether the white pill that has soothed her headaches for years now hides a darker price. She feels her belly, the possibility inside her, and wonders: whom should she trust?

This is the question of our time.

We live in a nation where trust in physicians and scientists has thinned to the point of translucence. Where once the white coat conferred an aura of certainty, now it is as much a target as a shield. Where science once occupied the pedestal of progress, it is now suspect—sometimes for good reason, often for dangerous ones.

And into this breach, in the vacuum left by eroded authority, step the performers of certainty: the populists, the strongmen, the influencers, the men who tell us that they alone can fix it.

The Fall of Deference

There was a time when doctors were not questioned. The physician’s word was near law, the scientist’s pronouncements carried the weight of scripture. To wear the white coat was to be robed in cultural armor, your authority second only to clergy or judge.

But the twentieth century delivered a series of betrayals. Tuskegee taught Black Americans that medical authority could cloak cruelty. Thalidomide scarred Europe with malformed births. Vioxx showed that profit could silence warning bells. The opioid epidemic proved that medicine could be bought, its authority wielded as weapon by corporations who understood how trust could be monetized.

Even where malice was absent, reversals eroded confidence. Eggs were dangerous, then they were healthful. Hormone replacement was salvation, then hazard. Fat was the enemy, then essential. Science is, by nature, a process of revision, but the public does not always hear it that way. To the average person, these reversals feel less like growth and more like betrayal.

Each stumble, each scandal, each pivot has chipped at the stone. Trust, once cathedral-like, now resembles ruins.

Into the Breach Walk the Populists

The vacuum did not remain unfilled. Demagogues and influencers rushed in, bearing the gift of certainty.

Donald Trump told us the experts were lying, that he alone saw the truth. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assures audiences that vaccines are not salvation but conspiracy. TikTok health gurus promise quick answers, often dressed in the garb of science but divorced from its method.

Different tribes, same playbook: they speak in feeling, not data; in clarity, not complexity; in spectacle, not process. Their audiences are not students of science but congregants at a revival.

This is the populism of health. It thrives on a single gesture: the pointing finger. They lied to you. They don’t care about your children. They serve Big Pharma, not you. Against this, the populist casts himself as the lone truth-teller, the one unbought voice.

In this theater, ambiguity is weakness. Nuance is treason. Certainty is the ticket to virality.

Case Study: Tylenol and Pregnancy

Consider the recent controversy over Tylenol in pregnancy. A scientific announcement framed the drug as a possible risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders. The media translated this into something more incendiary: an absolute that Tylenol in pregnancy causes autism. For a pregnant woman, such a headline is less “scientific nuance” and more thunderclap.

Enter Dr. Mike Varshavski, a physician and YouTube educator, who dissected the claim with sharp precision. He pointed out that the evidence was limited, the associations tenuous, the risk overstated. He worried aloud about what fear-mongering does to expectant mothers, how uncertainty inflated into alarm can cause more harm than the drug itself.

Here, in microcosm, we see the battle for health authority. The scientists announcing possible risk. The media amplifying it into spectacle. The physician pushing back with skepticism. And the public caught between.

What the public does not see is the painstaking work of science—the cautious parsing of data, the endless caveats. What they do see is the clash, the disagreement, the confusion. And in the absence of clarity, they turn to the figures who offer it most convincingly—regardless of whether it is true.

The Consequences of Spectacle

The cost of this dynamic is not theoretical. It is counted in lives.

Parents stall in paralysis, unsure whether to trust the doctor or the podcast host. Communities fracture along lines of belief rather than biology: one neighbor vaccinates, another refuses, both citing “science.” Public health becomes less about policy and more about persuasion in an attention economy where certainty is clickbait.

The deeper cost is to democracy itself. When health—the most intimate of concerns, the care of our bodies and children—becomes another battlefield for political spectacle, every citizen is conscripted. Every choice is politicized. Every life becomes collateral.

Toward a Different Covenant

The answer cannot be a return to blind faith. The myth of the infallible doctor, the unerring scientist, must die. What is needed is not deference but covenant: a new trust, grounded in transparency and humility.

This means scientists who tell us not just what they know but what they don’t. Physicians who admit limits rather than feign omniscience. Communicators who resist the urge to sensationalize uncertainty. Institutions that own their failures rather than bury them.

Trust can be rebuilt, but it must be rebuilt differently. Not as a fortress but as a bridge—held together by effort, repaired each time it cracks, sustained only if tended to over time.

Because between science and spectacle lies a fragile, necessary ground. A ground where complexity can coexist with clarity, where humility can coexist with authority, where truth is not decreed but shared.

The question is whether we will abandon that ground—or whether we will build again.

I was trained to believe in science the way others are trained to believe in God. The lab coat was my vestment, the peer-reviewed journal my scripture. For years I held fast to the creed that if one looked hard enough under a microscope, if one gathered enough data, the answers to human suffering would reveal themselves.

But science did not save me from disillusionment. Academic medicine promised truth and delivered profit. Corporate medicine promised efficiency and delivered dehumanization. I walked hospital corridors where patients became metrics, where colleagues bowed to billing codes rather than biology, and I wondered: is this all?

Then came George Floyd, his last breath pressed into the streets of Minneapolis, his death reverberating through Chicago, my city. At the same time, COVID tore through my community—through the lungs of the poor, the hearts of the elderly, the bodies of the Black and the brown. In those days I stepped outside the ivory tower and into the neighborhood clinics, into streets where loss was fresh and relentless. Chicago’s South Side, the land where the Panthers once organized, where Martin once marched, became my sanctuary.

It was there, amid grief and protest, that I began to unlearn the certainties I had carried. Faith had become science, and science had soured. I needed something higher.

Out of that rupture, I did something strange: I turned to the voices I had long been taught to despise. I began to listen to conservative influencers, Charlie Kirk among them. At first, it felt like trespassing on enemy ground. Their words were sharp, their critiques of people like me unrelenting. To listen was to risk being cut.

But I kept listening. And slowly I realized the terrain was not as foreign as I had once believed. Beneath the rhetoric I heard something familiar: the sense of betrayal, the rawness of anger, the fear of being unseen. I did not swallow their conclusions whole, but I learned to respect their search.

What became clear is this: belief is fragile. It bends with evidence, it shifts with time, it is molded by tribe. But Truth is higher than belief. Belief can change; Truth cannot.

And Love is the Truth.

This is the lesson medicine could not teach me, but humanity did: that there exists a middle way. Not the lukewarm compromise of “both sides,” but a way that begins deeper—at the soil of shared humanity. It is the recognition that before we are liberal or conservative, before we are believers in science or disciples of faith, we are bodies that bleed, lungs that ache, spirits that crave belonging.

As a physician, I know the body tells the truth more honestly than we do. Stress drives cortisol wild. Oppression raises blood pressure. Loneliness weakens immunity. These things do not care for your politics. Biology reminds us what belief obscures: we are bound together.

Charlie Kirk did not convert me. He did not make me abandon the convictions I hold as a Black physician in a wounded city. But his presence in my journey reminded me that conviction is not the same as Truth. That beyond the arguments and algorithms, beyond the fury of our factions, there is something that does not bend.

Love.

Love is not a cure-all, not a slogan, not an escape. Love is the hard work of seeing one another clearly, even when it hurts. For all of our differences of opinions, Charlie represents that work for me—the work of listening where we would rather turn away, of finding a face where we expect only an enemy.

And in that work lies the only chance we have—that from the ruins of our distrust, something whole might still be built.