Is Overprescription Fueling Veteran Suicides? | Derek Blumke

🚨Veteran Derek Blumke warns that prescribing veterans psychiatric drugs are leading to more suicides. He says the VA is not informing patients of medication risks or monitoring them properly.

"When you read these entire transcripts, which I've 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 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 age 24 went up by 60%, 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 boys and young men."