Veterans Have a Right to Know: A Hard-Fought Victory for Informed Consent

Sometimes advocacy works.

Not because somebody wrote a clever press release. Not because a hashtag caught fire. And certainly not because Washington suddenly decided to fix itself. It works because people refuse to shut up.

For years, veterans, families, advocates and veteran service organizations have been asking a remarkably simple question: If you are going to prescribe a veteran a powerful psychiatric medication, shouldn't that veteran understand what they're taking, what the risks are, what the alternatives are, and how they can safely stop taking it?

On September 28, the Department of Veterans Affairs took a significant step toward answering that question.

The VA announced new informed-consent requirements for veterans receiving psychotropic medications. Beginning in 2027, VA will require patient education and signature consent before concurrently prescribing opioids and benzodiazepines, as well as before prescribing antidepressants to veterans younger than 30. The VA will also require standardized education for veterans prescribed psychotropic medications and documented conversations covering risks, side effects, benefits, alternatives and safe discontinuation.

That matters. And the people who spent years pushing this issue deserve their moment.

This Didn't Happen by Accident

I want to personally congratulate Derek Blumke. Derek has been beating this drum long before it was fashionable, politically convenient or easy. His work on psychiatric prescribing, polypharmacy and veteran suicide stretches back years. What I respect most about Derek's approach is that the argument was never simply "medication is bad."

That's lazy.

The argument has always been much harder to dismiss: Veterans deserve to know. If a medication can help somebody, tell them. If it carries serious risks, tell them. If stopping the medication improperly can cause problems, tell them how to discontinue it safely. Then allow the veteran, their family and their provider to make an informed decision together. That's informed consent. Derek's persistence helped keep that conversation alive until enough people finally started listening.

And Then the VFW Put Its Weight Behind It

I also want to congratulate our friends at the Veterans of Foreign Wars. This is where advocacy becomes powerful.

The VFW didn't simply lend its logo to the issue. It made informed consent part of its legislative advocacy, brought the issue before Congress and mobilized its membership around it. In congressional testimony, the VFW explicitly called for strong signatory informed-consent protocols for mental-health medications and acknowledged its partnership with the Grunt Style Foundation in bringing attention to prescribing practices, informed consent and veteran mental health.

That partnership continued to grow. At its 2026 Washington Conference, VFW members carried written informed consent directly into meetings with lawmakers across the country as part of the organization's suicide-prevention legislative priorities. That's what a national veteran service organization is capable of doing when its membership decides an issue matters. To the VFW leadership, legislative staff, members and advocates who refused to let this disappear into Washington bureaucracy: well fucking done.

Grunt Style Foundation Found Its War Cry

For the Grunt Style Foundation, this victory is deeply personal. When we launched War Cry for Change, we made informed consent and safer prescribing practices central to the mission. We weren't interested in telling veterans what treatments they should or shouldn't choose. We were interested in making damn sure the choice belonged to them. That meant informed consent. And it meant finally asking difficult questions about the relationship between veteran mental-health treatment, polypharmacy and suicide.

The Foundation ultimately joined a much larger coalition. In April, more than 30 veterans organizations came together urging action on written informed consent, while bipartisan legislation—the Written Informed Consent Act—continued moving through Congress.

This wasn't one organization's victory. That's precisely what makes it important. Organizations across the veteran community added their names and credibility. Members of Congress from both parties took the issue seriously. And eventually the VA responded.

The VA Deserves Credit, Too

We spend plenty of time criticizing the Department of Veterans Affairs when it gets something wrong. So we should also acknowledge when it moves in the right direction. VA Secretary Doug Collins said when announcing the policy that America's veterans should receive as much information as possible when deciding what treatment is right for them.

Agreed.

The VA will spend the remainder of 2026 training employees and updating policies and procedures ahead of implementation in 2027. That is meaningful progress. It is also not the end of the conversation. The new VA policy does not implement the full scope sought by advocates or contained in the Written Informed Consent Act. That legislation would extend signed informed-consent requirements more broadly across antipsychotics, stimulants, antidepressants, anxiolytics and narcotics.

So this is a victory. It is not mission complete. And those two things can be true at the same time.