Washington, D.C. —U.S. Senator Joe Donnelly welcomed the House passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) today with support from both parties. The national defense bill includes Donnelly’s bipartisan Jacob Sexton Military Suicide Prevention Act of 2014, which would require an annual mental health assessment for all servicemembers.  Following House passage and in anticipation of Senate consideration, his office released a memo detailing the scourge of military suicide.

Donnelly, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, “We are one step closer to The Jacob Sexton Military Suicide Prevention Act being signed into law. Our service men and women serve our country honorably, putting their lives on the line in our defense, and we owe it to them to ensure they have access to the mental health resources they deserve. This bill is named for Indiana National Guardsman Jacob Sexton, who took his own life while home from Afghanistan on leave, and it takes common sense steps to prevent military suicide. With House passage, we are one step closer to making meaningful and major progress to help our servicemembers before it’s too late.”

To illustrate the scourge, Donnelly’s office released a memo detailing the scope of military suicide, including its prevalence across active duty military branches and how many servicemembers we lost in combat compared to suicide. 

To download the memo on military suicide, click here.

Donnelly’s bipartisan Sexton Act, included in the national defense bill, would:

• Require annual mental health assessments for all servicemembers—Active, Reserve, and Guard.  Right now, the best and most consistent screening is happening only for those within the deployment cycle which can leave non-deployed members of the Active, Reserve, and Guard components underserved.
• Maintain strong privacy protections for servicemembers.  We must ensure that seeking help remains a sign of strength by protecting the privacy of the servicemember coming forward.  The privacy of servicemembers would be ensured by guaranteeing medical privacy protections for these mental health assessments.
• Require an interagency report to evaluate existing military mental health practices and provide recommendations for improvement. This report, which is due to Congress within a year of enactment of the bill, would help identify which programs are working and which need to be fixed. A specific focus of the report will be identifying successful peer-to-peer programs that address the need for a more bottom-up approach to identifying warning signs and combatting stigma in each of the Services, with the intention of future expansion.

For more information on the Sexton Act, visit: http://www.donnelly.senate.gov/Jacob-Sexton-Act

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