Congress Orders Pentagon to Track Head Drugs

Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, has acknowledged that 106,000 soldiers take psychotropic medications. But the Military Health System cannot track the use of those drugs, the Senate Armed Services Committee said in its report on the 2011 Defense Authorization Act released in June.

The final version of that 924-page bill, which Congress sent to President Obama for his signature yesterday, contains language requiring Defense to find a way to track the use of these medications when troops return from deployment.

The Pentagon evaluates the health of troops when they return from the field through Defense's Post-Deployment Health Reassessment (PDHRA) program, which was set up in 2005 and places an emphasis on mental health assessment.

Until now, the PDHRA did not take a look at psychotropic drugs prescribed to troops during their deployment. The 2011 Defense bill (page 269 of the PDF, if you're looking for the language) mandates that Defense include an assessment of prescribed head drugs in the PDHRA, seemingly a simple exercise for one of the most computerized outfits on the planet.

The Pentagon has a habit of ignoring congressional mandates, something I hope does not happen in this instance, because as Chiarelli said, there is a relationship between overuse of head drugs and the epidemic of soldier suicides.