Veteran Overmedication and Suicide Prevention Act of 2025

This bill tells the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to hire the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to do an independent review of veteran deaths by suicide over the last five years. It applies to “covered veterans,” meaning any veteran who received VA care during the five years before their death. The review must count suicides, as well as violent and accidental deaths, and include basic details like age, gender, race, and ethnicity. It must also list medications and substances found on toxicology reports, highlighting drugs with black box warnings, off‑label uses, psychotropic drugs, and any with suicide warnings. The study looks at how often veterans were on multiple medications, who was not on VA‑prescribed meds, and how often non‑medication treatments (like therapy) were used first or tried and then found ineffective before medications were prescribed.

The review also examines VA practices and systems. It looks at how VA updates its prescribing guidelines and whether measuring pain as a “5th vital sign” is linked to more veterans being on many drugs. It reviews VA staffing for mental health counselors and marriage and family therapists, and it flags facilities with unusually high prescribing and suicide rates. The study checks how VA shares data with states and uses prescription drug monitoring programs, how it coordinates with outside doctors to prevent overprescribing, and what happens when overprescribing is found. It studies how VA works with medical examiners to confirm causes of death and how death certificate data are collected and shared among VA, the Department of Defense, states, and tribes. The National Academies may also identify patterns and suggest steps to improve safety and well‑being for veterans.

• Who is affected: Veterans who received VA care in the five years before their death (“covered veterans”) and the VA health system that serves them.
• What changes: VA must contract for an independent review with detailed analysis of deaths, medications, treatments, staffing, data sharing, and facility patterns, and compile data so it can improve clinical guidelines.
• When: VA must seek the agreement within 90 days of the law taking effect; the review report is due 180 days after the agreement; VA must send the results to Congress and make them public within 30 days after receiving the report.