With Wyoming among the nation’s highest in suicide rates, lawmakers opted out of mandating psychiatric drug screening—even as a public safety crisis looms.
A proposal to bring greater transparency to toxicology reporting in suicides and violent deaths was sidelined last month in the Wyoming Legislature after what a renowned mental health watchdog group called a “shocking amount of disinformation.”
Supported by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), the Death Data Collection and Toxicology Transparency Act would have required coroners to test for prescription psychiatric drugs—ranging from antidepressants and antipsychotics to stimulants and mood stabilizers—in all violent deaths, including suicides and homicides.
Advocates argue the measure, modeled partly on Tennessee’s 2025 transparency law, could help lawmakers understand the role that psychiatric drugs play in violent deaths or suicides—data that could guide future public safety and prevention policy.
The bill’s significance extends far beyond Wyoming: Psychiatric drugs are among the most common prescriptions in the US—more than one in eight adults take antidepressants—yet most state death investigations do not routinely screen for them post-mortem.
CCHR and other supporters of the measure say it balances civic transparency with privacy, noting that no names or medical records would ever be disclosed. “Evidence-based transparency is essential to protect families and save lives,” CCHR International President Jan Eastgate wrote in a statement.
Despite its narrow scope—strictly anonymous data collection—the committee declined to sponsor the measure as a full-committee bill, leaving individual legislators to reintroduce it next session.
The controversy came to a head during the committee’s autumn hearing, where a coroner, a psychiatrist and a watchdog group squared off over the bill’s intent and implications.
There, on October 17, 2025, the committee heard testimony from multiple stakeholders. Opposition came primarily from Laramie County Coroner Rebecca Reid, who argued that psychiatric drugs are so widely prescribed that their detection would not prove causation and that mandated reporting could stigmatize “treatment” or delay investigations.
CCHR argues that these claims misled lawmakers and diverted attention from empirical data. The watchdog cites studies from Britain and the US, which have found that the use of antidepressants increases the risk of suicide, violence and homicide—with the FDA requiring black box warnings on all antidepressants for increased suicide risk. International experts, CCHR points out, have documented cases in which selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) provoked suicidal or aggressive behavior even among healthy volunteers.
Since 2015, Wyoming has ranked among America’s top three states for self-inflicted deaths—30.4 per 100,000 residents in 2021–2022. From 2018 through 2021, the Equality State—so nicknamed for granting women the right to vote in 1869—led the nation outright. Within that grim tally were six child suicides aged 10 to 14 and 13 homicides under age 29.
