New Written Informed Consent Bill for Veterans Prescribed Psych Drugs in Congress to Stem Skyrocketing Military Suicide Rate

     US Representatives Gus Bilirakis, Jack Bergman, Keith Self, and others have just introduced their Written Informed Consent Act that requires signed informed consent forms by any military being told they should be prescribed  psychiatric drugs. The  prescribing physician would be mandated to go over the “side-effects’ of each drug as listed in its FDA Black Box warning, especially those warnings regarding  increased risk of suicide.

     That’s the good news.

     Here’s the bad news: why they are doing this.

     Although the Veterans Administration spent over $16 billion in 2024 on mental health, including $559 million on suicide prevention alone, 6500 veterans have died by suicide every year since 2015. 155,000 veterans have died by suicide since 2001.

     That’s more than twenty times the number of American soldiers (7000) who have died since 2001 in the ongoing international war on terror.

     Horribly enough, coincident with the steadily rising suicide rate of American veterans – it’s four times higher than the suicide rate for civilians of the same age group – the Veterans Administration has been spending far more money on psychotropic and pain medications for our soldiers. From 2001 to 2009 alone, the Defense Logistics Agency spent $1.1 billion on common psychiatric drugs and pain medications.

     Recent Veterans Administration studies have shown that as many as thirty percent of the soldiers who have been prescribed these medications have not been given proper informed consent protocol before taking the medication. That means they have not been educated on the Black Box risks of suicidal thoughts and behavior, especially among those in the age group of most soldiers.

     It’s been 25 years since the FDA mandated the Black Box warnings on SSRI’s and other psychotropic drugs to state the increased risks of suicide, both while taking them and after trying to withdraw from them. Certainly our soldiers should be fully informed of this.

     There’s one more piece of bad news here.

     Since 2000 the suicide rate for the general American population has risen by 37 percent, per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Just as in the military, anti-depressant use – especially long term anti-depressant use – has also risen considerably during that same time period. It’s hard to avoid noticing the coincidence of rising suicide rates with rising antidepressant use for both veterans and civilians.

     It’s time for one more piece of good news to be heard. We need another bill introduced to Congress mandating full informed consent procedure applied by every U.S. doctor when they’re about to prescribe a psychiatric drug to anyone.