Veterans Take Their “War Cry For Change” to Capitol Hill

Wearing colorful t-shirts emblazoned with the hashtag #NoMoreDeadFriends, dozens of veterans, families, and allies gathered on June 4–5 in Washington, DC for the “War Cry for Change to End Veteran Overprescribing” summit. The event was organized by several national Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs) led by the GruntStyle Foundation (GSF), in partnership with Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Disabled American Veterans (DAV), and in collaboration with the Irreverent Warriors and the Pink Berets. 

Participants traveled from across the US and internationally to take part in the summit, which challenged the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to investigate and address an overprescribing crisis coupled with high suicide rates. The groups argue that despite the VHA’s $571 million annual suicide prevention budget, veteran suicide rates continue to rise. 

A 2019 Mad in America report by Robert Whitaker and Derek Blumke, using the agency’s own statistics, found that rates of suicide have skyrocketed since 2006 in particular, when the VHA began implementing suicide prevention protocols that include routine screening, diagnosis, and often, SSRI antidepressants as a first-line treatment. VHA’s data show frighteningly paradoxical results from these post-2006 suicide prevention efforts: The highest rates of suicide in the cohort were the diagnosed and treated veterans, whereas the lowest were found among those who remained undiagnosed and untreated. 

The Hill summit built on over a decade of successful organizing for change at the VHA. Twelve years ago, major veterans’ advocacy groups descended on Washington to demand expanded access to care and benefits after toxic exposure to military burn pits in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. GSF executive director Will Wisner, who’d been involved in that fight, recalls vividly that the issue of overprescribing at the VHA “was part of that conversation.” Having secured the historic PACT Act of 2022, the veterans’ groups once again set their sights on the agency, ready for another fight. 

In 2024, Mad in America reported on the War Cry for Change campaign’s plans to bring their stories and message to Capitol Hill. Less than a year later, that vision became a reality, due in large part to the organizing efforts of Blumke, who established Mad in America’s Veterans Initiative and is currently GruntStyle Foundation’s Veteran Impact Fellow; and Angie Peacock, a speaker and educator whose experiences of polypharmacy and withdrawal are featured in the documentary Medicating Normal, screened as an opening to the summit. Peacock was instrumental in getting the prescription crisis onto the legislative radar of VFW during her tenure as a Student Veterans of America legislative fellow in 2019. At the time, she told Mad in America, she herself was in psychotropic drug withdrawal, yet still trying to advocate for any change she could help make. For Peacock, the DC summit was a “full circle moment,” with the collective effort finally getting the “national attention that it deserves.” 

The summit followed veterans’ harm reduction events in 2024 in Boston and at VFW’s National Home in Eaton Rapids, Michigan. Organizers also referenced past efforts to spotlight this issue, including the Food and Drug Administration’s 1991 “Prozac Hearings,” as well as the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s 2010 hearings which highlighted links between psychotropic medications and suicide. “In 2025, we are calling on leaders across all sectors to join us in advancing harm reduction strategies that prioritize safety, informed choice, and the long-term well-being of those who have served,” organizers wrote. 

Decision-makers are once again listening. The summit was attended, supported, and sponsored by several members of Congress who are veterans, including Sen. Jerry Moran, (R-Kan.), Chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), Chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, as well as Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), Chip Roy (R-Texas), Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), and Tom Barrett, (R-Mich.). Also in attendance were Dr. Stephanie Haridopolos of the Surgeon General’s Office and Dr. Marsden McGuire, director of Continuum of Care and General Mental Health in the Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention at the VHA.

“Not One More Life Lost:” Veterans Mobilize for Dignity in Mental Health

Immediately before the press conference began, attendees placed empty pillboxes into a large crystal skull displayed in front of the podium as a “symbol of solidarity against medication overprescribing.” The speakers included military families, veteran survivors of psychotropic harm, national veterans’ group leadership, and members of Congress. 

Blumke introduced his friend and legislator, Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), who he says “didn’t blink” when he’d asked him to sponsor the press conference. 

Bergman told the crowd: “We’re here today…to call attention to something that is a crisis in our country, costing the lives of our veterans: Overprescription. [It’s] no more complicated than that,” he said. “ This isn’t about attacking medicine. It’s about accountability, transparency, and choice.”

GSF president Tim Jensen began the press conference by laying out the scope of the crisis. Over 156,000 veterans have died by suicide in the two-plus decades since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, he said, while 68% of veterans in care received psychiatric medications. “We are overprescribing these individuals with psychotropics,” Jensen stated, with the potential for harm “not being communicated” to those in care. He pointed to longstanding policy efforts within the VHA to combat the opioid crisis, as an example of what could be done within the agency to address overprescription and suicide. 

Jensen also reiterated the core demands of the campaign: “ We’re asking for signatory informed consent, proper de-prescribing policies. We’re asking for some dignity in our mental health.” 

“ We can change this now,” he said. “The VHA can change this today. Not one more life needs to be sacrificed or lost.”

The VHA is “Failing Miserably:” Bereaved Families Demand Change

Several bereaved family members spoke at the press conference, sometimes pausing to stifle tears as they recounted the stories of their sons who died by suicide while in care at the VHA. Brian and Kim Brumfield brought a self-portrait photograph of their son Connor, a US Army veteran who died on April 13, 2023. Connor had been suffering from debilitating headaches, insomnia, and other symptoms related to a documented traumatic brain injury (TBI) he’d sustained while deployed. A student veteran, he’d visited the VHA to establish care after moving to Montana to attend college. At that visit, he’d scored 17 on the Pfizer-developed Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), which put him in the moderately high range for depression. Based on this result, Connor was given a prescription for bupropion (Wellbutrin). 

The Brumfields described a cascade of failures and missteps at the VHA that preceded their son’s death. First, the use of bupropion is contraindicated in the VHA’s own treatment guidelines for individuals with a TBI. The prescriber also ignored the FDA’s Black Box warning against prescribing the drug to people under 25. Connor was 22 at the time of his death, and his parents say he was never informed of the potential risks. If the VHA had followed established guidelines, “Connor would still be with us,” Brian Brumfield said. 

Both parents underscored that the PHQ-9 should not be used as a basis for prescribing medications, and that Connor’s score should have been interpreted in light of his untreated TBI. The mental health professionals at the VHA had also failed to do a lethal means assessment, they said. This is a mystifying lapse, given especially high rates of veteran gun ownership, with 71% of veteran suicide deaths involving firearms. “He had six rifles in his apartment,” Brian Brumfield said. “If this isn’t negligence, I don’t know what is.” 

“ The VHA says that suicide prevention is their top priority, yet they are failing miserably and have been for years,” Kim Brumfield added. “It’s long past time to make changes to the way the VHA evaluates and cares for the mental health of veterans.”

Shannon McDaniel spoke about her son, US Marine Corps veteran Hunter Whitley, whose story shares several parallels with Connor Brumfield’s. Like Brumfield, Whitley suffered from a TBI he’d gotten while deployed. McDaniel related how her son had been a student veteran with “invisible wounds” who entered care at the VHA in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He ended his life on November 13, 2022, 104 days after first seeking help, having just turned 23. 

After Whitley’s death, McDaniel requested a report from the VHA’s Office of the Inspector General, which was finally released in September 2024. “I felt like I lost Hunter all over again,” she recalled. “It was just a series of failures in Hunter’s care.” 

“These failures are not isolated incidents,” she added, but a “systemic breakdown in the care provided to our veterans.” 

Emergency medical physician Dr. Larry Miller traveled from Texas to DC to honor his son Mark Miller, a US Navy veteran who had been a Special Forces sniper and was deployed to Iraq. Father and son had co-authored a 2022 book, Suicide Stalks the Sniper, which details Mark Miller’s recovery, with family support, after a suicide attempt involving Prozac in 2007. Mark Miller subsequently became “addicted” to opioids, his father said, prescribed by the VHA for a war injury. After his mother’s death in March, he was desperate for a detox and help for his suicidality.

Larry Miller read out texts he’d received from his son on April 1, after an appointment at the Audie L. Murphy Hospital in San Antonio. “ They prescribed me Seroquel…Did not even listen to my story. Just like a robot that hands out poison to every soldier.” One week later, on April 7, Mark Miller walked back into the facility and took his own life.  ”He shot himself as a protest for what the VHA had done to him…and thousands and thousands of other veterans,” Larry Miller said. “This has got to stop.” 

Summit Brings Advocates, Experts, and Decisionmakers into Dialogue and Action

The summit continued with a roundtable at the Capitol Visitor Center, where panels of veterans, families, and subject matter experts gathered for dialogue and education of lawmakers and Congressional staff. Blumke, in his introduction of Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chair Mike Bost, referenced a GSF podcast episode that he and Tim Jensen had recorded with the lawmaker: “Chairman Bost leaned into this conversation.”

“When we start dealing with mental health—throwing pills at it seems to be the way they want to fix some of those problems,” the Chairman said. “But the drug doesn’t change the problem, the drug covers up the symptom.” 

Bost highlighted the role of post-traumatic stress and the promise of psychedelic-assisted therapy, referencing MDMA-assisted clinical trials at the Bronx VA. “We’re trying to find a cure, not just a cover up, he said. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop everything that we’re doing.”

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tx.) told the audience that as a veteran himself, “It’s not a talking point, it’s real. I view [this issue] through the lens of ‘Let’s give veterans the choice to do whatever they want to do.’” Gonzales, who spent five years deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, said, “We all fight demons in different ways.”

In an expert panel, Danish physician, researcher, and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration Dr. Peter Gøtzsche laid out his research examining 70 meta-analyses, which found that antidepressant treatment doubled rates of aggression and suicide in clinical trials. “Veterans at risk of suicide should not be treated with pills that double their risk of suicide, but with psychotherapy that halves the risk of suicide,” Gøtzsche said. “Why doesn’t this happen? Corruption. The money dictates it all. We should no longer tolerate this.”

Mad in America’s publisher Robert Whitaker elaborated on his 2019 co-authored report with Blumke outlining the outcomes of VHA’s suicide prevention strategy that relies on screening, diagnosis, and medication with SSRI antidepressants and other psychotropic medications as a first line of treatment. 

In doing so, he made a fundamental challenge to the VHA: “Have you adopted a form of treatment for suicide prevention that rather than reduce [suicide], is increasing it? What you have here is a constellation of data that fits together that is saying: We have a suicide prevention effort that is killing veterans.”

Another expert panel featured a conversation on harm reduction and informed consent with Peacock and psychiatrist Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, who collaborate in the emerging field of deprescribing. Peacock’s presentation focused on online withdrawal lay communities and insights from her own experience and work supporting others seeking to withdraw safely. “We need informed consent for going on and going off, and shared decision-making,” she said. “Most important to me is the demedicalization and depathologization of post-traumatic stress…that’s not a brain disease that I need Prozac for.”

Witt-Doerring presented on recent advances in deprescribing, calling on the VHA to train doctors, inform patients, and launch a national deprescribing telehealth service line. “This isn’t a huge leap,” he said. “There are countries and people doing this work. There are guidelines and books. We just need to take the next step and get this into the [VHA]…then it needs to be rolled out nationally.” 

As far as the War Cry for Change campaign’s next steps, veteran organizers hope that their peers on the Hill will help keep up the momentum and apply pressure in all the right places in Washington. “I have some hope because we’ve got members of Congress in office that are veterans,” GSF’s Wisner said at the press conference. “I know that every member in Congress that has served would wade through hell to go save their people.” 

He likened veterans serving in Congress to QRFs, military units equipped to respond rapidly to emergent situations in the field. “It’s on you, guys. Get loud.”