Killing US war veterans with antidepressants

On June 4-5 in 2025, a remarkable protest in Washington, DC took place.¹ Wearing colorful t-shirts emblazoned with the hashtag #NoMoreDeadFriends, dozens of veterans, families, and allies gathered for the “War cry for change to end veteran overprescribing” summit.

The event was organized by several national Veterans Service Organizations led by the GruntStyle Foundation. It challenged the Veterans Health Administration to investigate and address the overprescribing crisis coupled with high suicide rates. The suicide rate had skyrocketed since 2006 when the Administration began implementing suicide prevention protocols that include routine screening, diagnosis, and treatment with antidepressants.

A frightening report by science journalist Robert Whitaker and veteran Derek Blumke, one of the event organizers, had shown that the suicide rate had doubled among those who had been treated with drugs whereas it had declined among untreated veterans.²

If the suicide rates had remained stable at the rate they were in 2006, there would have been 10,000 to 15,000 fewer suicides among US veterans. This number is greater than the total of all combat deaths since 9/11. Over 156,000 veterans have died by suicide in the past 20 years,³ which is three times as many as those who died during the Vietnam War.

You would not think it possible, but the highly influential American Foundation for Suicide Prevention turned the data upside down and sounded an alarm about many people not getting helpful antidepressant treatment for their mental disorders to prevent suicide.⁴

The Foundation and its varying presidents received significant funding from pharmaceutical companies that market antidepressants. In addition, psychiatrists on industry payroll led its scientific advisory board and served terms as directors. The Foundation pushed screening programs to get more people onto treatment, and its advisory board and presidents touted depression drugs as “anti-suicide” pills.

Being deliberately so misleading is not only fraud; in my opnion, it is a crime against humanity.

Blumke had invited Whitaker and me to lecture at the Capitol. I said that “Veterans at risk of suicide should not be treated with pills that double their risk of suicide,⁵ but with psychotherapy that halves the risk of suicide.⁶ Why doesn’t this happen? Corruption. The money dictates it all. We should no longer tolerate this.”

Whitaker was equally blunt: “We have a suicide prevention effort that is killing veterans.”

I also explained, with reference to our own research⁷ and research of others,⁸ that depression pills increase the risk of violence and homicide and that violence has also been documented in animal studies.

The other speakers at the event were Kim Witczak, Josef Witt-Doerring and Angela Peacock.

Kim is a drug safety advocate and former member of the FDA’s Psychopharmaco-logical Drug Advisory Committee. She lost her husband Woody to a meaningless suicide.⁹ He wasn’t depressed and didn’t have a history of mental illness but was prescribed sertraline because he had difficulty sleeping. He developed akathisia, one of the most dangerous harms of antidepressants and antipsychotics. It is a state of extreme restlessness and inner turmoil. It literally means that you can’t sit still but feel you need to keep moving, and you may have the urge to tap your fingers, fidget, or jiggle your legs. Unfortunately, people rarely suspect that their symptoms could be drug harms; they think they have become crazy. Woody hanged himself in the garage.

Josef is a psychiatrist who has worked for the FDA and now runs a taper clinic helping people to come off psychiatric drugs. He runs a very interesting podcast channel and interviewed me for an hour after the summit: “Professor admits psychiatric drugs are making patients worse.”¹⁰

Angela is a veteran from Iraq who also helps people come off psychiatric drugs. She runs an initiative that provides holistic mental health coaching and consulting services for people who are looking to rebuild their lives after experiencing trauma.¹¹

Bob, Angela and I appeared in one of the best documentaries about psychiatry I have seen, “Medicating normal” from 2020, which is freely available.¹² Polypharmacy, the treatment with several drugs simultaneously, is very common among veterans with PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder)¹³ and Angela’s experiences with this and with withdrawal from psychiatric drugs are featured in the film, which was screened as an opening to the summit.

The days I spent in Washington DC with the veterans and my filmmaker, historian Janus Bang, are among the most moving I ever had. We had long conversations with the veterans and parents of soldiers who had committed suicide. We heard about what it was like to be at war and the huge traumas it inflicted on the soldiers.

It is so unfair and surreal that after having survived military combat, the lives of veterans were at risk by taking antidepressants on their return, which most of the severely traumatized soldiers had dutifully done because their doctor had prescribed them.

Janus and I decided that we would try to raise funds for a documentary about US and Danish war veterans. They so much deserve this and they were comrades both in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There was a press conference outside the Capitol at the House Triangle where the speakers included military families that had lost a veteran to suicide, veteran survivors of psychotropic drug harm, national veterans’ group leadership, and members of Congress who had been soldiers themselves.

Journalists from several major newspapers were present, but as far as I know, only the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the summit.

It is considered taboo to even raise the possibility that drugs used to prevent suicide do the opposite, and if you prove that it is true, it is even less likely that anyone will write about it. So strong are the commercial forces in healthcare.

The new Director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, had wanted to interview me for some time while he was professor at Stanford but he had been too busy. We interviewed him instead, about his visions for a better healthcare.¹⁴ We also discussed the veteran suicides, and it turned out that he had interviewed Kim for his podcast and knew her story very well.

Currently, the public is waking up to the dire fact that leading psychiatrists have been lying to them for the last 70 years about their specialty and about what psychiatric drugs and electroshock can accomplish.

It will be a painful awakening. As a journalist once wrote in relation to my research, nothing hurts like the truth about healthcare.¹⁵

References

1 Harris L. Veterans take their “War Cry For Change” to Capitol Hill. Mad in America 2025;June 14.

2 Whitaker R, Blumke D. Screening + Drug Treatment = Increase in Veteran Suicides. Mad in America 2019;Nov 10.

3 Robertson R. Military suicide prevention efforts fall short despite increased funding. Straight Arrow News 2025;Feb 26.

4 Whitaker R. Suicide in the age of Prozac. Mad in America 2018;Aug 6.

5 Hengartner MP, Plöderl M. Newer-generation antidepressants and suicide risk in randomized controlled trials: a re-analysis of the FDA database. Psychother Psychosom 2019;88:247-8 and Hengartner MP, Plöderl M. Reply to the Letter to the Editor: “Newer-Generation Antidepressants and Suicide Risk: Thoughts on Hengartner and Plöderl’s Re-Analysis.” Psychother Psychosom 2019;88:373-4; Vanderburg DG, Batzar E, Fogel I, et al. A pooled analysis of suicidality in double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of sertraline in adults. J Clin Psychiatry 2009;70:674-83..

6 Gøtzsche PC, Gøtzsche PK. Cognitive behavioural therapy halves the risk of repeated suicide attempts: systematic review. J R Soc Med 2017;110:404-10.

7 Sharma T, Guski LS, Freund N, et al. Suicidality and aggression during antidepressant treatment: systematic review and meta-analyses based on clinical study reports. BMJ 2016;352:i65; Maund E, Tendal B, Hróbjartsson A, Jørgensen KJ, Lundh A, Schroll J, Gøtzsche PC. Benefits and harms in clinical trials of duloxetine for treatment of major depressive disorder: comparison of clinical study reports, trial registries, and publications. BMJ 2014;348:g3510; Maund E, Guski LS, Gøtzsche PC. Considering benefits and harms of duloxetine for treatment of stress urinary incontinence: a meta-analysis of clinical study reports. CMAJ 2017;189:E194-203; Bielefeldt AØ, Danborg PB, Gøtzsche PC. Precursors to suicidality and violence on antidepressants: systematic review of trials in adult healthy volunteers. J R Soc Med 2016;109:381-92; Gøtzsche PC, Healy D. Restoring the two pivotal fluoxetine trials in children and adolescents with depression. Int J Risk Saf Med 2022;33;385-408.

8 Moore TJ, Glenmullen J, Furberg CD. Prescription drugs associated with reports of violence towards others. PLoS One 2010;5:e15337; Lucire Y, Crotty C. Antidepressant-induced akathisia-related homicides associated with diminishing mutations in metabolizing genes of the CYP450 family. Pharmgenomics Pers Med 2011;4:65-81.

9 Gøtzsche PC. Deadly psychiatry and organised denial. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2015, page 89.

10 Gøtzsche PC. Psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doerring interviews Peter C Gøtzsche. Institute for Scientific Freedom 2026;Jan 8.

11 Heartcore Collective. Angela Peacock’s website.

12 Cunningham L, Ractliffe W. Medicating Normal. Periscope Moving Pictures 2020. Freely available documentary.

13 Raut S, Mellor R, Meurk C, et al. Prevalence and factors associated with polypharmacy in military and veteran populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis. J Affect Disord 2025;369:411-20.

14 Visions for the new director of the US National Institutes of Health. Interview with Jay Bhattacharya. Broken Medical Science 2025;Dec 19.

15 Libak A. Sandheden om sundheden er ilde hørt. Berlingske Tidende 1999;May 23:4-5.