American Thought Leaders - Is Overprescription Fueling Veteran Suicides? | Derek Blumke

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

“Veterans are not being told the risk of their medications,“ says Derek Blumke. “Doctors themselves are not aware of the risks of those medications.”Derek Blumke served 12 years in the US Air Force and Michigan Air National Guard and is a longtime advocate for veterans. A bad experience with psychiatric drugs changed his life trajectory. He has been sounding the alarm about suicide and the overprescription of psychiatric drugs among veterans.“If we’re going to treat a firearm with respect that we should and we do, which is making sure there’s a safety on, making sure the weapon is not always loaded, don’t point at people, this is a similar thing. If one of these medications can cause you to harm yourself or others, you should be told of that. And right now, we’re not,” he says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Veterans are not being told the risk of their medications. And the reason I believe that they're most commonly not being told is because the doctors themselves are not aware of the risks of those medications. Derek Blumkey served 12 years in the U.S. Air Force and Michigan Air National Guard, and is a longtime advocate for veterans. A bad experience with psychiatric drugs changed his life trajectory. The more people you put into this machine under our current prescribing and care paradigm, the more cold bodies you're going to be coming out of the back end. He has been sounding the alarm about suicide

and the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs among veterans. I think where we're at today is that there is a huge point of hope because we have leaders in government that care about this problem. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yon Yalik. Eric Blumke, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Great to be with you, and thank you so much with the invitation. So until last year, The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, colloquially known as the VA, had never mentioned

psychiatric drugs in their annual suicide report, which is something that's mandated, an important report that comes at every year. So, and you highlighted this to me as an incredibly important point. Why is this so unusual? This is unusual because approximately 70% of all veterans under VA care are prescribed to psychiatric drug. Almost 30% are on endopressants. Almost all these drugs have box warnings, a warning of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. And when you have a treatment modality being used for 70% of your population and you're not even mentioning these medications that your primary

modality of treatment, almost all of which have risk profiles of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, this is alarming. And in this last report, the first ever mention of any psychiatric medication whatsoever was where they referenced sedative use disorder, which is primarily connected to those have been prescribed benzodiazepines. And the VA for the past 10 to 15 years has been actively deprescribing veterans from benzodiazepines because they know they're contraindicated for veterans diagnosed a post-traumatic stress disorder. So in 2012, approximately, 30% of all veterans under the VA care who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress had been prescribed benzodiazepine, Xanax, Valium, drugs of these types.

And they learned that these drugs were causing harm. And so during this entire period, they've been deprescribing veterans from these medications, now to a prescription rate for vets of PTSD under, I believe, 8%. But as you're deprescribing veterans from these medications, you're an increased suicide risk. because these drugs, when you're coming off of them, can be very dangerous, benzodiazepines, antidepressants, and other drugs.

So. Yeah, let me jump in here, a whole bunch of things. So I'm hearing that the VA is responsive when it sees problems, that that happens, that's great to hear. But wait a second, 70% of veterans being treated by the VA are on antidepressants, sorry, not antidepressants, but some sort of psychiatric medication. Correct.

That seems to me to be like a very significant statistic? These prescription rates are about four times that of the civilian population. And so when you have suicide rates that high of what we're seeing with veterans, suicide rates almost two and a half times or more that of the civilian population. You've got prescription rates four times that of civilian population. You have medications that have, we've got multiple studies showing suicide risk goes up by three and a half times, three times, two and a half times of suicide compared to police.

placebo, suicide attempt rates going up two and a half, three and a half times, one, these medications compared to placebo or non-treatment. This is a math problem that we're looking at. And this is pretty much the only way you can really look at this problem at this point. A math problem. Okay, explain that to me because it feels to me like something much bigger than a math problem. It's a math problem and the problem is not that we're not doing enough outreach. We spent $16, 17 billion in V mental health in the past six years alone, I believe.

And so we're putting piles of money towards this problem, and the primary effort has been trying to get veterans into care. The problem lies is when you start having your sole treatment modality of medication. So I worked at the VA. I built a National Mental Health program for the VA in 2011 to 12, 13, and I learned the way we do mental health, which is you do outreach, you screen the veteran if they have some type of mental health issue, whether it's depression or anxiety or post-traumatic. stress first diagnose then prescribe a medication to get the acute crisis

under control so that way the patient can accept therapy or the treatment and it's that point where we're putting this this risk profile this is where we're causing problems there's a research at Austria that shows there's about a 0.08% suicide risk during antidepressant starts so like the first six weeks you're on antidepressant and this is not just for veterans is for everyone and so if you've got a 0.08 suicide risk during that for six weeks and then you look at the number of veterans of the VA prescribed antidepressants so 1.75 million or so annually prescribed antidepressants not all of those are started on that medication

in that year but say 150,000 it might be you just multiply that out by that 0.08 percent suicide rate and you have about 120 dead veterans of the VA's 22 2300 or so annual suicide that happen while the veterans are under VA care of the 6,000 a change that occur annually. I guess what you're saying is you would hope there would be more care taken in those decisions to prescribe or not prescribe or offer some other kind of therapy, given that the cost is at least by your calculations 120 people of the current policies. And that's just antidepressant starts. That's not the tapering, withdrawal, getting somebody off a medication that may have been on it for a year

or years. My experience, I've been prescribed to Zoloft after being given a six-drug cocktail for a period of time, and I was trapped on Zoloft for a year. I mean, I've had a number of people on this show now who explain that there's just generally an over-prescription problem when it comes to psychiatric medications in many countries, and including the U.S. But you're saying that the VA, it's actually four times greater than the existing what people would call over-prescription reality. So in 2019, I published a report with Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy and Epidemic,

and we looked at the VA in suicides and medications. Screening plus drug treatment equals increase in veteran suicides was the title of this report. And as you start looking at the prescription rates, you start looking at how these medications interact, and then you also start looking at the failure to provide informed consent, which is the biggest issue here, which is veterans are not being told the risk of their medications. And the reason I believe that they're most commonly not being told is because the doctors themselves are not aware of the risks of those medications. And so when you start looking at the larger picture of 7 and 10 veterans under VA care prescriber on these medications, you start realizing you just start multiplying out suicide risk of these treatments and that's not even including poly pharma three four five six my friend angela peacock was prescribed 18 different drugs at the same time

there's no one but here's these things that can say that is okay well and and of course that these just aren't studied these cocktail these various mixes of drugs just aren't in some cases not studied at all all what the impact might be right there's yeah there's no studies showing a six drug seven drug drug eight drug cocktail is safe there there is you will not find a single one what you will find though and and leadership at the VA office of mental health will tell you that anything more than three medications psychiatric or CNS or central nervous system drugs at the same time you'll start seeing diminishing outcomes and so I'm not sure the confusion why we're also wondering why these suicide rates continue to increase when you just look at the prescription rates. And if the prescriptions and these medications were working and a treatment modality used

for 7 and 10 veterans under VA care, you would think you would actually see diminishing suicide rates. Right. And we're seeing the inverse. Right. Well, listen, at this point, you have an absolutely fascinating story on how you kind of got into becoming kind of a leading advocate around this issue of over-prescription. But why don't you tell me that?

So I was an Air Force vet. I did six years in active duty, six years in the International Guard. I did three deployments. My first being right after 9-11, I was deployed to air base in southern Uzbekistan, called K-KANabad Air Base, or K2. It was an old Russian base. And only in 2019 would we learn that the tactical nuclear weapon had been detonated there. And it was a chemical weapons depot for the Russians. using their fighter bombers going into Afghanistan in the 70s and 80s and so myself and about

15,000 other troops we later learned were exposed to all these horrific toxins. Fast forward to 2007 wound up transferring the University of Michigan. I started a student veterans group on campus because I was looking to connect other veterans in my transition and this turned out to be a wildly popular idea and we ended up starting a organization called Student Veterans of America and I helped to lead the efforts in our advocacy to help pass the post and I live in GI Bill in 2008. During that time, we had a suicide of a student veteran at UC Berkeley, and I felt like a commander that did not have the tools to address this crisis or to help help other vets on campuses with this issue.

That one death really drove me to start building towards mental health programming. My degree was already in psychology. and started at a passion wanted to work with troops with PTSD and that was kind of the path that really set me down this road and so during that time I got introduced to the head of VA mental health was recruited or build and run a national mental health program for the VA around that time was also invited to be a founding committee member of the National Action Alliance on suicide prevention which is the group that really wrote the national strategy for suicide prevention in 2012 and then most recently last year. And so I ran that program for about a year and a half, two years, and then moved to New York City, got a technology start-ups, and then got put on a drug cocktail. I'd started with Adderall.

Well, right. So you're working to help people in this, and then you kind of experience the other side of it, I guess, right? It's been unfortunate and painful for me as an example. Hunter Whitley is a 23-year-old former Marine. He was Abbey Gate in Afghanistan during the withdrawal. He'd suffered a minor TBI during the bombing there. Wound up at the University of Alabama, was a student veteran going to school full-time there,

and then was also volunteering at the mental health clinic on campus, a VA mental health clinic on campus. The program that I built was focused on helping veterans on college campus is access via mental health care. And so Hunter took his own life about two and a half years ago. And the program that I built is basically what became of that clinic, which was to help get vets into care. And Hunter was prescribed to antidepressant metazepine, along with hydroaxazine, and a month and a half later he was dead. And the VA did an investigation into his death and found that they failed to provide informed

consent failed to provide safe medication management my friend Brian and Kim Brumfield we were with last night along with Shannon they lost their son Connor 22 years old both of these young men had fit cleanly within the box warning by the FDA but in both cases it seems neither had been provided informed consent their families had been unaware that they were on a medication that could increase their suicide risk and both were gone far too young. You have encountered so many of these, you know, horrible stories, but, you know, and you also avoided becoming one yourself, but what, tell me what happened from the

beginning. Yeah, so I was, I, it was in New York City. I got behind in some of my class. I was trying to pad my resume to go to Harvard Business School, because I believe at that time, then if I didn't go to Harvard, my life would be a career, my career would be a failure. I think that's really funny today, especially funny today. And I was starting a technology company at the same time. And so I went to a psychiatrist, realizing that, hey, maybe I do have a problem. Maybe this ADHD diagnosis I had as a kid was real. And I went and got prescribed Adderall.

And not long after prescribed Ambien because I couldn't sleep because of stimulant, gabapentin for anxiety, two or three other medications. Life is falling apart, career is falling apart, companies on fire. A friend packs me up at Halls me back to Michigan and U. U. Hall, and I spent the next year and a half kind of bouncing around from Airbnb to not-so-great Airbnb's hotels, sleeping on friends, couches, and floors. The story of many vets who struggle or have gone down that path. And so it was during that time I had met a friend and they shared that they were going to get their antidepressant increased.

And I asked how their counseling was going, which is a common question you'd ask, working in mental health. And she'd chaired that she wasn't getting counseling because her insurance didn't cover that. And that was the moment I started realizing, wait a minute, like, when's last time I saw a counselor? I started looking back through my time at the VA, almost three years of care at that point. Never once had I had a single counseling session. My care had primarily been just psychiatric drugs. And then I started realizing, wait a minute, how many medications am I on? And I started counting, and then I hit my second hand.

And I realized what the hell is going on. And that was the moment that I realized that what we're doing is not working. What I was doing was killing me, what we did with some of these medications, getting them through to market, and the overprescribing these drugs nationwide and, frankly, across the Western Hemisphere is driving what we're seeing today. And it's resulting in tragedies every day. So, well, let's, so this is, you mentioned something called the black box warning. I think there might be a number of viewers who don't even know what a black box warning is.

It's a relatively new concept for me, frankly. So black box warnings are associated with medications have increased risk of harm. And antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and other classes of psychiatric drugs come with this warning that there can be increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. They don't call it suicide because the researchers like to split these terms between suicides, suicide attempts, thoughts and behaviors. I frankly think it's just because it sounds better than saying what it really is, which is causing suicides. And so you have these box warnings that are supposed to be there to warn patients that there is an increased risk of possible harm. It's also something like, if I may, right?

It's like not every drug gets a black box warning. Correct. Like it's something that's saying there's a significant risk that, you know, definitely anyone that's prescribing it should be talking about, I think. In order to get any of these warnings on these medications by the FDA, they had to show causation. And the studies that they had showed there was causation and the thoughts and behaviors of suicide.

And so that's what resulted in these box warnings. Kim Witzack, she helped to get these warnings on these drugs in 2004 and then 2006 after her husband killed himself after a five-week sample of Zoloft. And these warnings are serious, and unfortunately, the mental health industry as a whole has not treated them with that same respect. If we're going to treat a firearm with respect that we should, and we do, which is making sure there's a safety, making sure the weapon's not always loaded, don't point at people, this is a similar thing.

If one of these medications can cause you to harm yourself or others, you should be told of that. And right now, we're not. But how is it possible that a medical practitioner or a doctor that's prescribing us, because you alluded to this earlier in our conversation, how would it be possible that they might not actually even know that black box warning is on there? Because that's kind of the purpose of it in the first place, isn't it?

They know the warning, but, in their medical training, and I'm meeting doctors fresh at a medical school today, that they're not even learning anything at all about antidepressant withdrawal. I was in a VA clinic just two weeks ago, and a doctor wanted to prescribe me an interpresent, and I shared my experience of being trapped on an antopressant for a year. And she seemed as though it was the first time she'd ever heard of antidepressant withdrawal. So if you're not being trained on these things in medical school, and you don't know. And so you come to believe that the patients that are coming in and out of your doors when you start seeing mania or psychosis, after they've already been treating them for a little while with a medication, for example, they see increased diagnoses. They see bipolar disorder. They see schizophrenia. They see other psychotic disorders. And so instead of identifying the side effects, mania and psychosis being among them for antidepressants, as an example, and SSRIs,

they're seeing these other disorders and you wind up going from one antidepressant to anirin antipsychotic, in addition to antepressant, another mood stabilizer, benzodiazepine, and all of a sudden you're on five, six, or more drugs. And so it's this evolution that we keep on creating these cascading effects of these medications. Intent is good, but unfortunately the way we do care, we're causing more harm than we are good at this point. So, I mean, there's a few things at play here, if I may. It seems like, you know, that there's a kind of a rush to prescribe when there might be some other approaches, like even maybe talk therapy or something like that being one of them, although that's, I guess, expensive and maybe difficult for some.

So there's that aspect. And then there's an aspect where initially, I don't know if I got this right, but I think you were saying that doctors will, might not even know about some of the side effects or don't entirely disclose those side effects. And then the next thing is they might not realize that there's an interactive effect and that these side effects might actually be causing the symptoms. And then finally, many of them don't realize that you have to

wean yourself off many of these drugs that going cold turkey could actually create these symptoms suicidality and so forth. There's these, you know, there's a whole, I had a recent guest, Dr. Yosef, who has a clinic dedicated just to helping people get off of these cocktails of medications in a safe way. So, I mean, it feels to be like there's many pressure points along the way that doctors need to be educated about. There's another problem, too, and that, and I've heard this from psychiatrists, I've seen documents, internal markups of pieces of legislation. about signatory informed consent, basically requiring the doctor to have a formal conversation, which is already law, and having the patient sign that they understand the risks and efficacy of the

treatment they're being provided. There's concern from many doctors that if you tell the patient of all the side effects, they won't take their medication. That sounds a lot like informed consent. Isn't that what informed consent is about? That's what I was about to say. Yeah. So you can't, I mean, sort of the point is that someone gets to choose whether they want to take the risk. Exactly. And the patients are being robbed of that because the doctor feels what they're doing and what they're saying and what they're telling their patient is the best thing for their patient. And that the patient, it's not their decision, it's the doctor's decision.

And by not sharing these side effects, persistent sexual dysfunction or PSSD associated with SSRIs, cranial and brain development of issues of infants, whose mother's been prescribed esterized. You start looking at all these things, and these patients have a right to know what they're putting in their bodies, and they should know what to be looking for, and their family members should be aware. So they can see the behavioral changes,

because the family and the friends around them are going to see those things first before the individual usually will. Part of it is just, you know, if every, Everybody's aware, if you're deciding on a treatment method and you know there's an increased risk of suicidality, by the way, of course it's not that everyone will experience that. It's just that there's some significant percentage that might. You can kind of watch for that and pull the person off quickly if people are alert. I think our big argument here is, and with my role at the Grunstaff Foundation, is we're not calling for stopping prescribing these medications.

There is a place for medications and care. What we're calling for are safer and smarter prescribing policies that make sure that patients are aware of the risk and efficacy of their treatments. The doctors are retrained, and mental health counselors and psychologists are trained to look for these things. That we have slower, smarter tapering guidelines, because right now we're doing two-week reductions and just yanking people off of medications. They've been on for years and decades in some cases. and we're causing harm. And other action is release the data. The VA is sitting on probably the largest tranche of health data in the world

on these issues of medications, adverse drug events, and you can actually see increased disability rates as you start seeing increase in prescription rates, just like you can see increases in suicide rates, issues with the justice system. All these things are tracking line by line as these prescription rates continue, and continue to increase. So on the issue of informed consent,

I understand that you advocate for written informed consent every time. And why does it need to be written? Why is that so important? It's important because right now it's actually federal law. The VA's 38 CFR 1732 requires, it outlines informed consent policies for treatments across VA. not just medications, but all treatments.

And in there, it actually describes if there is a potential for serious risk of harm or adverse events, that there should be signatory informed consent. If you go to get a colonoscopy, you're required to sign that I understand that this treatment could kill me, but that's the risk that you take based upon the conversation between yourself and your doctor.

This is not happening, even though federal law currently requires the VA to do this. And really, this is more of an interpretation by folks envy his Office of Mental Health and the Health Administration saying, we don't need to do that because these drugs are safe and they work great and there's no major problems here. In reality, if there's a risk of killing yourself, I'd call that a major possible adverse outcome. And there should be a warning that goes along with that. And so that's what we're really calling for is that.

more information for patients and more information for doctors across the board. What do you know about how, you know, the psychiatric medication is prescribed kind of, you know, very quickly right out of the blocks as opposed to kind of a broader assessment? This is something I've heard has become more the norm. Can you tell me a bit about those patterns? I think this has been a huge evolution. So, I mean, when we first, when JFK actually shut down the silums nationwide in the 60s, It was because what had been a great idea with this asylum system, which was more of a model by the Quakers,

which is we bring these people to these beautiful ranches or castle-like types of places. They have gardens and animals, and they pretend the gardens, and they care for the animals, and they milk the cows, and it gives them a sense of purpose, give them a sense of community. but fast forward in the 60s we started cost cutting or we over the years over the decades we've been cost cutting to the point where we're packing 10 15 patients into a two two room room and as we've gone forward to the medications that was kind of part of the arguments we have these medications benzodiazepines and other drugs that help these people that's why we can do outpatient care they don't need to be in the asylums anymore and so we shut down the asylums fast forward to today with these medications. For decades, psychiatrists would actually spend a lot of time with their patients. You'd see your psychiatrist an hour a week or more, in many cases. And when SSRIs first came to market in 88 and with Prozac and 91 and Soloft, that was their approach. They were still spending a lot of time with the patient. They were monitoring them much more closely.

And so as prescriptions of these medications began in the 90s, that was still the model. move into the 2000s and all of a sudden everybody's on these medications because it's quick, cheap, and easy. And I'd be all for that if these medications were safe and effective. But unfortunately, efficacy is not what we expect it to be. And the risk profiles are dramatic. And so as we have seen increases in prescription rates, we're basically treating this as a cheaper, faster way of doing mental health treatment. In the short term, it's cheaper. Long term, you start looking at my example,

being taken out of the workforce. You start seeing mental illness disability rates increasing. How much is it cost to care for a veteran and pay disability vets for benefits to a veteran or any American than it is to actually do the hard work and the right treatments and give them the right care on the front end? And that's where we're at.

So it sounds like you're saying that basically The benefits are oversold and the risks are undersold as a general rule of them. I think that's a pretty great way of summing that up, and the data supports that. When these medications first came to market, Dr. Daniel E. Casey, a psychiatrist of the Portland VA at that time, he also was the chair of the FDA's Psychopharmacological Drug Advisory Committee. And in these hearings, the entire debate was about efficacy. The drug companies are required to submit two studies with FDA for review. They could have done 20 others, but they just needed to show two that showed some level of efficacy.

And when you read these entire transcripts which have done, the entire debate for these multi-hour meetings, hearings, were solely about efficacy. And we have a belief that we can trust our government. We believe that these medications are studied rigorously, that we're. We are looking for not just efficacy but safety, but what we now know is that that has not been happening, and it never was. And now we have a suicide epidemic, not just of veterans, but of the entire American population. Suicide rates have continued to skyrocket for all groups. Young women from 20 to 21 prescription rates of antidepressants went up by 130% for young

women to age 24 went up by 60 percent and during that period suicides of that those groups spiked for young men prescription rates stayed the same or declined slightly and we did not see the suicide spikes that we did with young young boys and young men and so as we look at veterans we look at similarly prescribed populations and you see the same story over and over and over again so there's the signal basically that that requires attention but so something interesting I mean, I went to this press event that you had in the House Triangle, quite a few veterans doing some really heart-wrenching stories. And you told me that this is kind of a first of its kind, and that's incredible. Like, how could it be that it, this, there hasn't been, I mean,

you've been doing this advocacy for some time, right? Well, when I first came out on this issue in 2019, no one wanted to hear it. I met the head of health policy. at the House Veterans Affairs Committee during that time. And when I said, I'm Derek. I've been working on this issue of medication, antidepressants, and suicides. I started this organization, Student Medicine America.

She pauses and looks at me and says, oh, you're the one. This was the response. If not, outright conspiracy theorists, was the look. And today, unfortunately, it's taken this many more years to start realizing that we have a crisis on our hand, it's only because we have so many more bodies stacked up.

And so the event that we held the past several days was I think the first the veterans community has held ever around this issue. I believe in 2015, there was a small protest where veterans threw their pill bottles over the White House fence under the White House grounds is a form of protesting, we can do better than this. And that's largely what we did for the past two days

is a partnership between the Grunt Style Foundation. veterans of foreign wars and the disabled American veterans, which was calling attention to this issue of overprescribing. Not throwing pill bottles? There were pill bottles involved, and the veterans in attendance at that press conference walked up to a translucent skull that we created and placed their pill bottles in the skull, and that skull sat there the entire time as this press conference went on as these families went forward and talked to their loved ones, and as Congressman Bergman, who

sponsor this press conference was so passionate and so articulate saying that we can do better and this over prescribing issue is causing problems and causing harm and we can fix this by being smarter and safer in the way you prescribe whenever we're dealing with any medication there really is there's always a cost benefit and you need to consider the potential cost given you know whatever the bet that benefit might be right and that calculation is going to be different for different people So it requires a very kind of personal approach. You can't kind of blanket prescribe something,

a psychiatric medication would be very useful for one person, but for another person it could actually be highly problematic. Tylenol. Yeah. Tylenol is a great example. Right. I mean, there are huge benefits of Tylenol, but some people should not take Tylenol.

And we know that, we make those decisions on our own, knowing that we have the information to make those smart decisions. You offered a whole bunch of, I know, earlier in our conversation, like kind of policy ideas. I want to kind of get back to that a little bit. I mean, is it as simple as more individualized care and doctors knowing that there's these risks and that they must disclose them? How much of the problem would that solve? I believe for veterans under VA care, if we just provided more information to patients,

retrained our doctors and our mental health clinicians, provided slower, safer tapering guidelines, I believe we would probably see possibly 25% reduction in veteran suicides of the VA alone. How did you come up with that number out of curiosity? Math. No idea. You keep saying it's a math problem. Exactly. This is a math problem.

This is not an outreach problem. And this is not throw another $577 million at this problem manually. This is, I believe that that was one of their marketing budgets the past couple of years for mental health and suicide prevention. This is the more people you put into this machine under our current prescribing and care paradigm, the more cold bodies you're going to be coming out of the back end. And I wish there were a nicer, gentler way of saying this. But these families, the country deserves to hear the truth. and these families deserve to have their voices heard.

The Brumfields, Shannon McDaniel, Dr. Larry Miller lost his son just two months ago as he shot himself in front of the San Antonio VA Medical Center. For people who have had these tragedies happen, sometimes they'll be quick to try to find a reason, and they might pick this, and maybe it's not necessarily the reason, right? I think is where it gives a lot of his family solace, is that there's data and studies showing, supporting what they may have thought in the back of their minds. Like you're saying they saw, you know, their son or daughter get on some kind of medication and behavior changes or multiple medications, behavior changes, something's wrong. Yep, exactly. And so in the last week that Connor Brumfield was alive,

He made some kind of bizarre phone calls to his mom. His roommate noticed significant behavioral changes before his death. Prior to that, this is a young man. He was an Eagle Scout, one of the Army, had a mild TBI from a vehicle accident. What is that? Traumatic brain injury. I had a mild brain injury from a vehicle accident, which is actually the way most Americans get brain injuries,

and it's not a veteran problem. This is a everywhere problem. And so there are studies showing that you should not be prescribing Wellbutrin, which is the medication this young man was prescribed if there is a traumatic brain injury involved. And that's exactly what happened. Shannon McDaniel, her son Hunter Whitley, she didn't know what to think when she lost her son, other than just outright despair and hopelessness. And it wasn't until a VA employee had mentioned to her that somebody dropped the ball. The exact quote is what she shared. And when she made inquiries to the VA trying

to get medical records, it took them like six months to provide her son's medical records. And when she got them, it didn't make a lot of sense because she's not a clinician. And so she continued to ask questions. And that resulted in the VA's Office of Inspector General conducting an investigation. And so they found that the clinician failed

to provide informed consent. failed to provide safe medication management, fail to provide lethal means assessments, make sure does this individual have firearms nearby, are there ways of storing them safely for now until we get this crisis averted, and these things were not done. And so I think the argument that we hear is that, oh, they were depressed, and we know that that is a precursor and is connected with suicides. No one will argue that.

But when you have medications that we know increase risk of suicidal thoughts, what else should you be looking at? I think most people hearing these conversations and looking at the numbers and looking at the charts and graphs and prescription rates skyrocketing and then suicide rates tracking right with them, disability rates increasing as prescription rates increase in over a dozen countries, you start seeing trends that track with the actual data that shows that suicidal thoughts and behaviors can be caused by antidepressant medications and other psychiatric drugs. I'm just thinking about your career trajectory and then this, you know, it's almost like

you were kind of made to do this. It's terrifying, actually. My former boss at the VA, Jan Kemp, she actually built the Veterans Crisis Line for the VA. I was just shared a report, which I see Jan's name all the time, shared a report with her name on it, the author of it, talking about this issue related to medications, and it's overlap after overlap or after overlap, being invited to be part of the National Action Alliance on suicide prevention. Like, I was a 26-year-old kid, 27, maybe 28, but just finished leading student veterans of America. No clinical background. But I found a passion for this because I realized it was the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, that does come at a cost, is working with these families, working with those who have lost their loved ones, working with those who had their lives destroyed and totally turned upside down. and also dealing with your own recovery. Working on this issue is traumatic every day. Working on myself after having gone through a drug cocktail and a year-long withdrawal, never mind my exposure is overseas in the military. And I'm very fortunate to be with the Grunstaff Foundation,

working with the VFW and DAV and other national veterans organizations on this issue. But unfortunately, reform can't happen fast enough. Every day that goes by is another day that another veteran is prescribed one of these medications with a conversation of, hey, how about we try this? And not having any discussion whatsoever of the potential catastrophic effects that can occur. And so, while many people are benefited by many of these medications, many, unfortunately, have bad outcomes. And many have similar experiences I did with my withdrawal.

And when you have a VA that is aware that these conversations have been occurring, I met with former VA Secretary McDonough, briefed him for an hour in his office in March of last year, Under Secretary Elinhal, the former Under Secretary of Health, briefed him on this. He sent an internal email to his leadership introducing me as chief medical officer describing, hey, concerns have been raised about possible over-prescribing and adverse outcomes resulting from prescribing practices of VA. I'd like to have a conversation with Derek, have this conversation, and again, no action. And the VA's opinion up until now has been, we can't act. This is an HHS thing.

We can't retrain our clinicians. We cannot retrain our counselors on making these medications prescribing safer. We can't do signatory informed consent for lots of reasons to include, it'll take too much of our time, but really keep on pointing the finger at, oh, this is H. or this is SAMHSA, or this is FDA, or this is DA. I think anybody who's prescribing 70% of all your veterans, a class of drugs, classes of drugs that can result in major adverse outcomes, you have responsibility

to be smarter and safer in which you do so. So it sounds to me like there needs to be some sort of cooperation between HHS and the VA ultimately to resolve some of these issues. And I mean, you've actually have been speaking with people that are part of HHS or sub-agencies. There's a whole new Maha approach at HHS. How is that manifesting in your work in this roundtable you recently hosted with a HHS official?

The convening that we held the past couple of days, the roundtable, veteran harm reduction roundtable, exploring the relationship between medications and veteran suicides, was basically a follow-up from the 2010 House Veterans Affairs Committee hearings where they discussed this issue, they focus on this issue, but unfortunately the APA's psychiatric and psychological associations came forward and testified and said, everything's fine, nothing to see here. Don't take any hasty action legislatively that might stop the prescribing these medications that are life-saving, was the arguments. And so I think where we're at today is

that there is a huge point of hope because we have leaders in government that care about this problem. Secretary Kennedy has public statements on this issue. The MAHA executive order calling for investigations and the threat of selective serotonin reuptych inhibitors, antipsychotics, stimulants, and weight loss drugs. We're at a point in time in history that I never thought I'd see. I thought that I'd wind up becoming a martyr over this issue.

And I never believed that we'd have the leaders come into government with President Trump and with RFK Jr. going in there and saying, we have a problem and we're going to talk about it. And we're going to do something about it. And so having met Dr. Herodopoulos, acting chief of staff and senior advisor at the certain general's office, she came and spoke at a round table yesterday, committing that this is a priority of this administration, meeting the former acting head of the FDA in tears as we're talking about this crisis and the loss of these families and her doubling down and saying this is a priority of this administration, this is a priority of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And finding myself high-fiving, senior FDA official,

was the moment in history that I never thought it ever see come or could have even dreamed of. And so I believe we're in a place where we are going to see action, and I believe the near future. I believe that these changes can occur through a very, very robust and detailed partnership between HHS and VA, where we look to provide more information for patients and more information for doctors, and so we can make prescribing safer and smarter. And I believe we're in a point in time where we're going to see that in the very near future. And I do believe Secretary Collins is one of those leaders that can act on this and wants to work with Secretary Kennedy on this types of problems. Regardless of what your political affiliation is, Democrat, Republican, Independent, or whatever else it may be, we can do mental health better, not just for veterans, but for all Americans.

And I believe that that's the path that we're on. Well, Derek Bumpke, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. It's been an honor. Thank you very much, John, for having me. Thank you all for joining Derek Blunky and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jania Kellick.