PTSD | VA Disability Benefits

PTSD Disability Benefits

Post-traumatic stress disorder affects thousands of veterans who served our country with honor. When military service causes lasting psychological trauma, veterans deserve comprehensive support through VA disability compensation. Navigating the claims process can feel overwhelming, but understanding your rights and the documentation requirements significantly improves your chances of approval.

Building a Strong PTSD Disability Claim

Successful claims require comprehensive medical evidence. Start by obtaining a formal diagnosis from a psychiatrist or psychologist who specializes in trauma-related disorders. Your medical records should detail specific symptoms, their severity, and how they impact your daily functioning. The VA rates PTSD on a scale from 0 to 100 percent, with higher ratings reflecting more severe impairment in occupational and social functioning.

Gathering buddy statements from fellow service members who witnessed your stressor event strengthens your claim considerably. These firsthand accounts provide crucial corroboration when official records are incomplete. Personal statements describing how PTSD affects your relationships, employment, and daily activities also carry significant weight.

Service treatment records, personnel files, and deployment documentation help establish the occurrence of your stressor event. Even without direct documentation of a specific incident, patterns in your records showing behavioral changes after deployment can support your claim.

Members of the military risking life and limb to defend their country deserve the best care we can give them. In many cases, this hasn’t been happening. It is imperative for veterans to receive PTSD benefits.

PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is one area where, again and again, soldiers with legitimate disabilities have been cut off without the appropriate VA benefits. In response, strong legal advice is beneficial to determine whether an injustice has been done, and to present the most favorable argument.

The issue tends to turn on whether a dismissed soldier is dismissed due to PTSD, or whether they were considered to have been suffering from a ‘personality disorder.’ PTSD benefits are essential.

Army figures show that up to 1,000 soldiers a year were being diagnosed as having personality disorders between 2005 and 2007. After adverse publicity about the issue, the Defense Department brought in more rigorous procedures designed to better identify whether a ‘personality disorder’ could be the result of post-traumatic stress or brain injury instead.

By 2009, the figures had fallen very dramatically, with only 260 being dismissed. The number of individuals diagnosed with PTSD doubled in the space of two years. While that’s good news, it still suggests a lot of soldiers were unfairly deprived of benefits due to them earlier.

Even with Sabo v United States sweeping through the system, many veterans with PTSD have been left to fend for themselves due to a simple matter of misdiagnosis.

Contact an experienced VA claims Claims Attorney and VA Hospital Negligence Lawyer to learn more about options for compensation, injury settlements and PTSD benefits.

PTSD Symptoms

After a traumatic event, PTSD can last years if not diagnosed and treated. Veterans showing PTSD symptoms should seek counseling, and should be compensated by the VA for their service-related injury. Symptoms of PTSD can get worse if not treated. PTSD symptoms may include:

• Depression
• Flashbacks—reliving a traumatic event again and again
• Bad dreams and difficulty sleeping
• Frightening thoughts
• Avoidance—avoiding people, places or thoughts that remind you of an event
• Being startled easily
• Feeling tense
• Having difficulty sleeping
• Having angry outbursts

If you are experiencing one or more of the PTSD symptoms described above, you are encouraged to talk to family and friends, a mental health professional, or someone from VA center. Symptoms of PTSD usually begin within 3 months of a traumatic incident, but sometimes are delayed and can start years afterward.

Symptoms that continue for more than a month and interfere with relationships or a job can be considered PTSD. To be diagnosed with PTSD, and qualify for VA PTSD benefits, a veteran must have the following for at least 1 month:

• A re-experiencing symptom—you may be triggered by a word, a thought or a sound.
• An avoidance symptom
• Arousal and reactivity symptoms—constantly stressed or angry.
• Cognition and mood symptoms—depression, guilt, loss of interest in life or activities

What Qualifies as Service-Connected PTSD?

Veterans may develop PTSD from various military experiences, including combat situations, military sexual trauma, training accidents, or witnessing traumatic events during deployment. The VA recognizes that psychological injuries deserve the same consideration as physical wounds. To establish a valid claim, you must demonstrate three essential elements: a current PTSD diagnosis from a qualified mental health professional, evidence of an in-service stressor event, and a medical nexus linking your current condition to your military service.

Many veterans struggle with this connection, particularly when service records don’t fully document the triggering incident. Combat veterans often have an easier path because the VA grants more lenient evidentiary standards for combat-related claims. However, non-combat PTSD claims require more detailed documentation and corroboration.

PTSD Diagnosis & VA Benefits

Some of the symptoms of PTSD are felt by the majority of us in the aftermath of a trauma (either directly experienced or witnessed), such as a car/plane crash, rape or kidnapping, child abuse, terrorist attack, or war. We’ll generally be affected by feelings of fear and of being overwhelmed, and will experience difficulty sleeping.

The majority of us will recover and get back to some sort of normality within days or weeks. But these symptoms won’t merely come to an end for PTSD sufferers, who have often seen not one single event, but have experienced a long sequence of crises, often involving acts perpetrated by humans rather than ‘Acts of God’ – these circumstances explain why soldiers in war zones and child abuse sufferers are particularly prone to PTSD.

For PTSD sufferers, the after-effects of the trauma will carry on affecting them again and again, and will often intensify rather than abate.  For the purposes of diagnosis, the symptoms must have been exhibited for at least a month.) A vivid re-experiencing of the traumatic event time after time is common in PTSD sufferers.

Withdrawal from life, particularly from anything that might remind them of the event, is also a common symptom. Irrational mood-swings, bursts of anger, and an exaggerated sense of alertness and inability to sleep are frequent. These last symptoms are particularly problematic with a view to diagnosing PTSD, as they bear a strong resemblance to those seen in personality disorders.

PTSD Treatment & Compensation

It’s important that PTSD sufferers get proper treatment, as the mental health disorder tends not to go away if left unaddressed. The key is to confront the troubling thoughts, coming to terms with feelings of guilt or blame (where present), and examining how they have affected your life.

Explaining what happened and why is an important part of the treatment of PTSD, and if family members are involved and can come to understand what the sufferer has been through, that can contribute enormously to healing.

Many Veteran Care Centers and VA hospitals offer the opportunity to undergo individual and, crucially, group therapy, involving sessions with other veterans who have been through the same problems. Some treatment options include:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—this form of therapy assists patients in learning healthier ways of coping with distressing emotions, and to reduce avoidance behaviors and other dangerous actions, including substance abuse.
• Exposure Therapy is one form of CBT designed to reduce the level of fear and anxiety associated with specific “triggers” which serve as painful reminders of the original traumatic event. The reduction of fear is accomplished by exposing patients to their particular triggers and working through the associated fears and anxieties.
• Stress Inoculation Training is a similar treatment in that it helps a PTSD patient gain confidence in his or her ability to deal with triggers and the anxiety and fear that accompany reminders of their original trauma.
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a multi-stage therapy treatment designed to first identify patients’ sources of stress, discussing their specific symptoms, perform hypnotic treatment, and then discussing again with the counselor until improvement is attained.

Common Challenges in PTSD Claims

The VA denies many initial PTSD claims due to insufficient evidence or failure to establish the service connection. Veterans often underestimate the level of detail required or struggle to articulate how their symptoms relate to specific service experiences. The claims process involves complex medical terminology and strict procedural requirements that can confuse even the most organized applicants.

Another frequent obstacle involves the Compensation and Pension examination. The VA schedules these evaluations to assess your current condition, but a single brief appointment may not capture the full scope of your symptoms. Veterans sometimes receive lower disability ratings than their condition warrants because the examiner didn’t have complete information or the veteran had difficulty discussing traumatic experiences with an unfamiliar evaluator.

The therapy needed to tackle PTSD tends to be longer term, and can be expensive. Even for those not affected by PTSD, military life tends to leave a profound effect.

A survey conducted by the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) covered over 5,800 service-members and veterans, and found that only 8% had not experienced any concerns over mental health, while as many as 62% had suffered from depression – as opposed to just 8.6% in the general population. Life for more extreme cases, such as veterans with PTSD, is bleak unless they get the necessary treatment.

PTSD Disability Lawsuits

A lack of understanding of PTSD in earlier years resulted in many soldiers being wrongly diagnosed, with doctors believing they were simply exhibiting symptoms of a naturally held disorder, and that they would have suffered from such problems even in the absence of military action.

As a result, many were placed on very low compensation rates of 10 percent. Now PTSD generally commands a rate of 50 percent or more, but that wasn’t the case for those diagnosed years ago.

It’s vital that those who may be suffering from PTSD can inform themselves of the full facts, so that they can decide whether or not they received the correct diagnosis, and what action they should take next. Without a doubt, PTSD disability benefits help in recovery. Veterans may be able to recover the following damages:

• Physical and Psychological Injuries Leading to PTSD—victims of PTSD may suffer from several physical and psychological issues requiring very expensive medical treatment and rehabilitation. Long-term therapy, counseling and prescription drugs may cost thousands of dollars each year, and a successful claim against the responsible party may recover much of these costs.
• Lost Wages & Loss of Future Income—when PTSD affects every aspect of a person’s life, they are often unable to work in the same capacity as they once did. In severe cases of PTSD following a traumatic event, victims are not able to return to work for long periods of time. These lost wages and potential lost future earnings can be calculated by experts, and a negligent party that caused the original trauma may be liable for certain financial recovery.
• Pain & Suffering—in most cases of PTSD, victims of psychological trauma are entitled to compensation for their pain and suffering.
• Punitive Damages—many courts and juries will numerate punitive damages when defendants are shown to exhibit a reckless disregard for safety, or where there is a proven intent to cause harm. Punitive damages exist to punish irresponsible parties so that they will alter their behavior or actions in the future.