RFK Wants to Send People to ‘Wellness Farms.' The US Already Tried That.

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17-04-2025

Collage by Liz Coulbourn
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In a clip from a July 2024 virtual town hall that recirculated online earlier this year, now Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argues that the US should combat addiction by opening 'wellness farms' to help people get off opioids, antidepressants, and stimulants. Kennedy says people taking medications for conditions like depression and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), along with those living with addiction, could spend three or four years growing organic produce on these farms to be 're-parented' and 'reconnect with communities.'
RFK Jr. went on to declare during his confirmation hearing for the HHS secretary position that "a healthy person has a thousand dreams" while "a sick person has only one" — implying that the only dream a disabled person can have is of being cured.
And in an April speech addressing the 'epidemic' of autism affecting U.S. children, RFK Jr. claimed: 'Autism destroys families…these are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted…and we need to put an end to it.' Repeatedly, the man leading the nation's health department has affirmed his view of people with disabilities as a burden.
Online, some users have compared RFK Jr.'s vision of 'wellness farms' with Nazi concentration or Japanese-American internment camps. Few, however, have made the connection to the disabled colonies established in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.
In short: America has already tried wellness farms. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the first few decades of the 20th century, epileptic and "feebleminded' colonies sprung up around the US. The initial purpose of these colonies was to remove patients from overcrowded, badly run asylums and poorhouses in favor of farm life where they would have access to the outdoors.
Under the colony model, patients generally lived in 'cottages' designed to be more homelike than institutional. Patients were also given jobs, and many were expected to work on colony farms where they grew their own food. Dr. William Spratling, the medical superintendent of the Craig Colony for Epileptics in New York, declared that the farm model meant, 'Nature, the great restorer, will have an opportunity to do her best.'
It didn't work.
Supporters of the colony model argued that — with time — clean air, sunshine, a restricted diet, and physical labor could heal patients of the medical conditions that ostracized them from society. But that didn't happen.
Data from the Craig Colony — one of America's first epileptic colonies, opened in 1896 — illustrates this point. During the 1940s, thanks to funding and staff limitations because of World War II, conditions in North American institutions were particularly grim. The institution's 1943-1944 annual report to the state Commissioner of Mental Hygiene shows that less than 1% of patients were discharged as 'cured' that year. During that same period, over 200 patients attempted to leave the colony without permission, and over 5% of the total patient population died.
If the goal was to actually segregate disabled people from public life, you could say the colony model succeeded. As Michael Rembis, associate professor and director of the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo, wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, the physicians, social workers, and state officials who ran colonies and other institutions for disabled individuals were 'driven by an ableist logic that was always infused with racialist, gendered, and class-based thinking' in their attempts at 'segregating, sterilizing, and generally restricting the world's disabled population.'
Colonies also assured that disabled people would be shielded from public view, similar to the 19th- and 20th-century 'Ugly Laws' that made it illegal to exist in public spaces as a person with a visible disability.
In the early 20th century, epileptic and feebleminded colonies became hotbeds for eugenics. In 1924, a teenage girl named Carrie Buck was institutionalized at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded after becoming pregnant outside of marriage. In part because Carrie's birth mother had also been institutionalized, the medical superintendent of the Virginia State Colony sought to have her sterilized — so she wouldn't pass down her alleged mental defect to any additional children.
The resulting court case, Buck v. Bell, went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote for the majority, declared in reference to Carrie, her birth mother, and Carrie's daughter that 'three generations of imbeciles are enough.' In the end, Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will. Buck v. Bell was never overturned, and 31 states still allow the forced sterilization of disabled people, according to a 2022 report from the National Women's Law Center.
Across the country, up to 70,000 forced sterilizations took place throughout the 20th century, per NPR, with many of them occurring in colonies and other institutions. Rather than focusing on curing patients, colonies became about control: control over who got to live in communities and who didn't, and control over who would have the opportunity to have children.
RFK Jr.'s fixation on wellness farms also risks stripping disabled Americans of the right to choose how they live their own lives. In 1999, the US Supreme Court declared that disabled Americans have the right to live and receive support in their communities when medically appropriate, rather than be forced into state-run institutions.
Although RFK Jr. maintains that admission to his wellness farms would be voluntary, the Trump administration has essentially labeled people with disabilities, chronic health conditions, and neurodivergence — as well as the essential medications on which many of them rely — a threat to national security. This language makes it clear that disabled people are not welcome in this new 'Make America Healthy Again' era.
Perhaps, then, it shouldn't be surprising that under the 'Make America Healthy Again' mantra we are seeing a resurgence of eugenecist talking points and attempts by lawmakers to strip back disabled people's rights. Last month, as The Guardian reported, a University of Texas at Austin-owned venue hosted a natalism conference featuring a number of controversial far-right and eugenics-aligned speakers who promote high birth rates.
In her 'Disability Visibility' column for Teen Vogue, activist Alice Wong has called mask bans 'the new Ugly Laws.' And 17 state attorneys general are currently suing to fight the inclusion of gender dysphoria in a list of disabilities protected from discrimination under Section 504, the legislation that mandates any organization receiving federal funds must be physically accessible and provide accommodations to those who need it and that sets the foundation for the Americans With Disabilities Act. The lawsuit also challenges the constitutionality of Section 504, which many disability activists and legal experts fear could overturn protections disabled people rely on.
For the disabled patients forced into colonies during the 19th and 20th centuries, life was not easy. In addition to forced (unpaid) labor and the risk of sterilization, patients sometimes underwent experimental treatments and lived in overcrowded conditions. New York's Craig Colony was so chronically understaffed that, as of fall 1943, over 30% of the colony's total positions were unfilled.
Overcrowding became so severe at Craig that a 1944 state report described some buildings with 'conditions not duplicated in any other institution in the Department.' In one house designated for men deemed 'mentally incompetent,' the report found that:
'…nearly two hundred patients walk up and down [the day room] with no place for most of them to sit except on the floor and nothing to keep them in the least occupied. In a corner closet are piled sixty mattresses foul with the smell of urine, waiting to be laid out in rows on the floor of the Day-Room when evening comes. In this building young boys are herded together with middle-aged and old men, all of them mental incompetents and some admittedly sexual perverts…. The contrast between these crowded buildings and the cow barn, where the dairy herd of the institution is kept, is marked. The cows are kept in clean spacious quarters, well provided with fodder, while certain of the wards of the State in this institution have lived and slept under conditions which members of the Commission felt could never have existed in a civilized community….'
Wellness farms aren't about wellness at all. In practice, history shows us, they're about eliminating disabled people from public life.
In 1899 the Craig Colony's Dr. Spratling proclaimed, 'Epilepsy is not so much a disease that can be reached with a single drug or the contents of a written prescription. It is more a condition that pervades every part of the human economy, a condition that needs to be eradicated, educated out of the system, so to speak.' Compare this to RFK Jr.'s assertion that disabled people taking psychiatric drugs should 'learn to get re-parented.' When a statement from the US health secretary in the 21st century sounds like a quote from 1899, I'd argue that's a return to eugenics, not an endorsement of modern medicine.
Even if colonies did somehow 'cure' patients, disabled people deserve to choose how they live and to live with dignity. Disabilities don't ostracize the vulnerable from society or keep them in conditions worse than cattle; people do.
What if, instead of upholding toxic wellness culture, we reject the eugenicist beliefs underpinning Make America Healthy Again? As disabled activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha said, we can still dream 'a future where disabled people survive, but more than that, we lead, we shape the world, we create futures infused with disabled knowledge and ways of living and imaginings.'
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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