Trump’s Mental Health Plan: Defund, Incarcerate, Disappear

Mother Jones illustration; Mark Schiefelbein/AP

When President Donald Trump tries to defend his mass deportation agenda, he claims, without evidence, that immigrants are entering the United States from “mental institutions and insane asylums.” 

When he wants to insult people—like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Mo.), or former Vice President Kamala Harris—he calls them “low IQ,” “deranged,” and “mentally disabled.” 

And when he and Vice President JD Vance tried to justify the federal takeover of Washington, DC, they claimed it was necessary in order to get mentally ill people off the streets. “Why have we convinced ourselves that it’s compassionate to allow a person who’s obviously a schizophrenic, or suffering from some other mental illness, why is it compassionate to let that person fester in the streets?” Vance said—offering as evidence, CNN reported, an anecdote “about his family being yelled at during a trip to DC.”

This is what mental health and disability advocates people call “sanist” language—words used to stigmatize mental health conditions in a derogatory way. Trump routinely turns to it to degrade his enemies and justify his actions. A review of his speeches and interviews includes more than 200 uses of the word “crazy” thus far in his second term, and “lunatic” and “insane” more than 60 times each, according to a Roll Call database.

While these words can be part of casual vernacular, Trump’s constant use of dismissive and stigmatizing rhetoric matches his actions. His officials have dismantled key parts of the federal workforce dedicated to treatment and prevention and canceled millions of dollars in research grants focused on mental health. In doing so, experts say, Trump and his cronies are not only undermining support systems for people with mental illness but also worsening some of the same issues they claim to prioritize, including minimizing crime and reducing homelessness. 

“When you cut those services, you have a lot of downstream impacts, and that’s going to include upticks in emergency department visits, hospitalization needs, incarceration and in homelessness,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

One of Trump’s most sweeping attacks on people with mental illness came in late July, when he signed an executive order pushing “long-term” involuntary institutionalization for people with mental illnesses experiencing homelessness, which the order argues the EO argues will “restore public order.” Trump was more blunt about his hopes for what the EO would actually do a few weeks later, when he announced the deployment of National Guard troops to DC: “Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR,” he posted on Truth Social. The White House did not respond to a series of questions.

Advocacy groups quickly pointed to a plethora of issues in Trump’s order, including that it criminalizes mental illness and tramples the civil rights of unhoused people, particularly those with mental health disabilities. “This executive order diverts resources away from the real solutions we know work and instead embraces coercion over care,” National Disability Rights Network executive director Marlene Sallo said in a press release. As the National Alliance to End Homelessness pointed out, the order does not address who will determine involuntary civil commitment, under what criteria, nor acknowledge the shortage of mental health beds nationwide—an issue the American Psychiatric Association asked Trump to tackle at the start of his second term. 

Research indicates that involuntary commitment can be highly traumatic and lead to people cycling in and out of institutions without getting the support they need. More research is needed on how best to support unhoused people with mental health disabilities and substance abuse issues, but Wesolowski, of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said that Trump’s order is not the way forward. “If we want to both reduce the burden of chronic conditions in this country and reduce homelessness,” she said, “the solution to that is to help people sooner.” 

Trump’s cabinet seems to share his disdain for people struggling with mental health. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy oversees the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, and the FDA, among other agencies—and since he was confirmed in February, has shuttered key offices and fired critical staffers throughout the department.

As our colleague Kiera Butler previously reported, during his doomed presidential campaign, Kennedy floated sending people on antidepressants to “wellness farms…to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” He also baselessly implied, during a 2023 event with future DOGE head Elon Musk, that antidepressants could be to blame for school shootings. Just last month, the FDA held a misinformation-fest about antidepressants in pregnancy during which panelists argued that perinatal depression does not actually exist and that antidepressants are overprescribed to pregnant women, despite research suggesting that only six to ten percent take them. A leaked strategy document, that Kennedy’s so-called Make America Healthy Again Commission reportedly submitted to the president, obtained by Politico, called for a working group on antidepressant “overprescription trends” among kids. 

Federal staffers working on mental health-related issues, meanwhile, have been purged by Trump’s government. NIH has lost 7,000 workers, roughly 16 percent of its workforce, through firings and resignations, according to a ProPublica analysis. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) lost an even higher proportion, at 22 percent.

HHS also plans to cut more than $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which will be collapsed into a proposed “Administration for a Healthy America,” following cuts of $72 million from March’s continuing appropriations bill; dwarfing an additional $19 million the agency supposedly plans to earmark to support housing for people with severe mental illness.

In a May letter to Kennedy, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and three Democratic senators said the plans to dissolve SAMHSA appear to violate the federal law that created it. A slew of advocacy organizations also condemned the proposed cuts, calling to preserve the agency and its funding.

NIMH will also be swallowed up into the newly proposed National Institute of Behavioral Health, along with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

An HHS spokesperson told Mother Jones that “Secretary Kennedy remains deeply committed to the mental health of all Americans, including our nation’s children” and that “under the Secretary’s leadership, SAMHSA is sustaining and strengthening essential mental health and substance use programs so people can access timely, high-quality care.”

Many NIMH research projects have also been decimated. In March, Michael Bronstein, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota (UMN), received news that he was dreading: He and his colleagues were losing what was left of their four-year, $187,000 research grant from the NIMH to study vaccine hesitancy in people with severe mental illness. (Bronstein spoke to Mother Jones in his personal capacity.) 

The work was important. Research has shown that people with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are vaccinated at lower rates. They are also more likely to die of illnesses for which we have vaccines. But under the leadership of RFK Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, the NIH deprioritized research on vaccine hesitancy, according to the grant termination notice Bronstein received—and a Washington Post report published the same day. 

The news was particularly cruel for Bronstein, who with his colleagues had already spent time recruiting about 60 participants who were prepared to open up to researchers about their mental health conditions. “When things get cancelled like this,” Bronstein said, “it’s a betrayal of those individuals’ trust”—and of research that he believed was “going to have a real impact on public health.”

Past NIMH research has, indeed, had major implications for treating mental illness. One 2008 study, for example, investigated treatments for psychosis in young people experiencing an initial schizophrenic episode, and led to the launch of hundreds of treatment programs for schizophrenia nationwide. The research found that wraparound treatment of psychosis after an initial episode led to less severe episodes later in life.

That study was “a great example of research being put into practice and making a huge impact,” Wesolowski said. “But we need more of that.”

But mental health research has been a particular focus on the chopping block of DOGE, which terminated hundreds of NIH grants—with NIMH grants accounting for the largest subset, according to a paper published in JAMA in May. Since then, dozens more NIMH grants have been cancelled, although some terminations have been reversed or are likely to be reversed following a slate of legal challenges, according to the database Grant Witness.  

The majority of the cancelled NIMH grants featured in the JAMA study—nearly 75 percent, according to Mother Jones’ analysis—focused on research involving LGBTQ people, who are more than twice as likely as straight, cisgender people to report mental disorders. And with the Trump administration’s additional measures seeking to erase LGBTQ people from public life—by banning trans troops from the military, dismissing discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and purging LGBTQ history from public spaces—these rates could climb even higher. 

Many of the NIMH-funded projects specifically aimed to better understand these disparities. One cancelled grant, for example, was intended to study how stigma, including state laws restricting trans health care, shapes the mental health of trans people living in rural areas. The project, part of Kirsten F. Siebach’s doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, will continue thanks to an alternative funding source. (Siebach also spoke to Mother Jones in their personal capacity, not on behalf of the university.) 

But Siebach, who hopes to build their career as a public health researcher focusing on how structural stigma affects LGBTQ people, worries that “there’s just no funding to support such work” going forward.

There is already evidence that Trump’s return to the White House has made things worse for LGBTQ kids’ mental health. The day after Trump’s re-election last November, the Trevor Project, an organization focused on preventing suicide among LGBTQ youth, reported a 700 percent increase in contacts to its crisis lines. On Inauguration Day, when Trump signed an executive order that essentially refused to acknowledge the existence of trans people, the organization saw a more than 30 percent increase in contacts compared to weeks prior. Casey Pick, the organization’s director of law and policy, said those spikes reflect the fact that “LGBTQ youth are well aware that the access to care, to support of adults, to welcoming and affirming schools and medical environments is very much at risk.”

One of the highest-profile blows for LGBTQ young people came last month, when SAMHSA officially shuttered the National Suicide Hotline’s specialized services for LGBTQ youth. Those services, received more than one million contacts since launching in 2022. In a statement, SAMHSA claimed that access to “culturally competent crisis counselors” would continue, adding, “Anyone who calls the Lifeline will continue to receive compassion and help.” 

The administration has also undermined support for LGBTQ youth mental health in less public ways: Seven of the cancelled NIMH grants in the JAMA study, Mother Jones found, were explicitly focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth. (Two were since reinstated, but face cancellation again due to a recent Supreme Court ruling.) Two explicitly focused on suicide prevention among Black LGBTQ youth, who report disproportionate suicide risk; another aimed to implement and measure a pilot program for LGBTQ youth at risk of suicide in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Projects like these, Pick said, helped experts “to see trends, patterns, disparities in the mental health outcomes for our LGBTQ+ young people and to begin to identify solutions.” 

Explicit attacks on LGBTQ young people in particular are coupled with indirect impacts on their mental health from other administration actions: Trump’s involuntary commitment order, for example, is likely to have a disproportionate impact on LGBTQ young people, given that they experience homelessness at higher rates than their straight and cis peers. Trump’s executive order seeking to end federal funding for K-12 schools that promote so-called “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” could penalize teachers and school counselors who seek to support LGBTQ students, which would ultimately harm the students themselves, given that research has shown accepting adults can reduce their risk of suicide. And LGBTQ youth and their families who flee their home states, or even the country, to escape threats to gender-affirming care or outright bans may further struggle after being uprooted and losing support systems.

“What is so important now is that we make sure that young people know that they are not alone, that they still have access to resources,” Pick said, “but the reality is, this is a very challenging time.”