H.R. 136 — Veteran Overmedication and Suicide Prevention Act of 2025

This section establishes the short title of the Act as the “Veteran Overmedication and Suicide Prevention Act of 2025.”

This section directs the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, not later than 90 days after enactment, to seek an agreement with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to review the deaths by suicide of all covered veterans during the 5-year period ending on the date of enactment, regardless of whether the deaths were reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The review must report the total numbers of covered veterans who died by suicide, violent death, and accidental death during that 5-year period; provide demographic information for each covered veteran, including age, gender, race, and ethnicity; and compile toxicology and prescription information, including medications with black box warnings, off-label use, psychotropic drugs, and drugs with warnings that included suicidal ideation. It also must summarize Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) diagnoses that led to prescribing those medications for post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, military sexual trauma, and other anxiety and depressive disorders; identify instances of concurrent use of multiple medications and instances in which no VA-prescribed medication was being taken; compare the percentage of covered veterans who received non-medication first-line treatment with those who received medication only; and count cases in which non-medication treatment, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, was tried and found ineffective before medication was prescribed. In addition, the review must describe how VA develops and updates clinical practice guidelines for prescribing medications; analyze VA’s use of pain scores under the Pain as the 5th Vital Sign Toolkit and the relationship between those measurements and concurrent multi-drug prescribing; and describe VA efforts to maintain staffing of mental health professionals, including mental health counselors and marriage and family therapists, by addressing impediments to education, training, hiring, eligibility criteria, trainee program participation, hiring guidelines, staffing gaps, staffing ratios, creation of an occupational series, and the composition of professional standards boards.