Before the SSRI: Common Sense Finally Reaches the War Department
Updated
Marine veteran Chad Robichaux came home after serving our nation in Afghanistan in one piece, or so it seemed. Robichaux served eight deployments as a Force Recon Marine, and once he returned home, he did everything right to take care of himself. He ate a clean diet and trained hard enough to fight professionally. But something was still wrong. He was irritable, exhausted, plagued by depression, and unable to focus. He described feeling a real sense of doom. The VA’s answer? A simple prescription for antidepressants.
Guess what? That was the wrong answer, and it wasn’t until Robichaux sought bloodwork on his own that he found the answer. His testosterone levels were severely out of balance. Once he corrected that, he no longer needed the SSRIs at all, sharing, “I felt like I knocked 10 to 15 years off the way I felt.” Simply put, a decorated Marine spent who knows how long medicated with dangerous SSRIs for a mental illness he may not have had, while the actual problem remained unchecked.
Robichaux’s story is the driving reason to understand the reasoning behind Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s announcement on July 15 that every active service member 30 and older will now be screened annually for testosterone deficiency, with treatment optional and left up to the individual. Predictably, following Hegseth’s announcement, the same mainstream medical and media class that celebrates hormones for every other purpose discovered an overnight cause for caution. Their reaction reveals far more about them than it does about Hegseth’s new policy.
In reality, adding the screening makes perfect sense. Why? Because the military and VA reached first for the prescription pad for decades. When a soldier reported fatigue, a depressed mood, trouble concentrating, and so on, out came the antidepressant, with little to no questions asked about what was going on underneath the surface. Testosterone declines with age, and tanking levels produce those exact symptoms, along with muscle loss, weight gain, and links to diabetes and depression. Nonetheless, obvious upstream causes often went unchecked, with our service members instead being handed pills that treated an improperly given diagnosis. Checking a hormone level before prescribing an SSRI is common sense and should be the bare minimum of looking for a cause instead of medicating a symptom.
Along with Robichaux’s compelling journey, there is a backstory to Hegseth’s announcement. Congress flagged this new treatment protocol in the 2025 defense bill. Indeed, veterans serving in special operations have spent years describing what they call “Operator Syndrome,” or the breakdown that comes with years of hard service, including wrecked sleep, endless pain, numbed emotions, and hormonal collapse. Men like Robichaux (who now campaigns to get providers to look for hormonal deficiencies before defaulting to psychiatric drugs) took matters into their own hands and built an awareness platform themselves because the system would not. And Hegseth listened.
As with many things political, the double standard is obvious. After Hegseth’s announcement, the Endocrine Society warned there is “insufficient evidence” to screen men who feel fine. Sure, that advice may sound reasonable, but this is the same group that recommends cross-sex hormones to teenagers under the banner of “affirming care” and labels anyone not on board a bigot. Apparently, hormones to transition a fifteen-year-old are compassionate and hormones to restore a forty-year-old combat veteran are reckless overreach. Go figure. They cannot hold both positions honestly.
As should be the case with all medical procedures, the treatment following testing must remain voluntary, and a low testosterone reading should never negatively follow a soldier through his career, because that number will live in the same assessment that measures whether they can be deployed. Likewise, for anyone who genuinely cares about warrior strength, it is important to remember that low hormone levels, including testosterone, are often a symptom, not the root. The forces that flattened these service members—little to no sleep, high stress, injury, and a diet stocked with fake and ultra-processed foods—are the deeper cause.
Is replacing an SSRI prescription with a testosterone injection just swapping Band-Aids on a lifestyle that must be fixed? Hopefully not. The screening is a good step, because it looks upstream. The task now is to keep going upstream to real food and real recovery.
Our dedicated warriors have, for years, been victims of a failed system that easily medicated them and never asked why (they are the ultimate experiment, after all, but that is another story). The sudden panic about testosterone testing from the usual quarters is selective to the point of dishonesty. Hegseth is right, the testing makes sense, but let’s finish the job not with just a prescription, but with what their bodies need in the first place.