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Legislation introduced recently by Rep. John Hall, D-Dover Plains, would lift the burden of proof from veterans who served in combat zones and have a diagnosis of PTSD, allowing them to receive disability benefits without having to prove that a specific incident caused the disorder. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone, more than 100,000 veterans have been found to have PTSD, but only 42,000 have been granted service-connected disability for their condition, said Hall, chairman of the Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs. The disability claims backlog at the VA tops 800,000. A large percentage of that number are Vietnam veterans seeking compensation for PTSD, Hall said.

Scientific American has a knock-out article that questions whether the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder is a coherent psychological concept or whether it is actually making the situation worse for soldiers with post-combat mental health problems.

Today, IAVA Member Veteran Carolyn Schapper testified at a hearing before the House Veterans Subcommittee on Disability & Memorial Affairs about the disparities in PTSD diagnosis for male and female soldiers in combat. During her deployment to Iraq from October 2005 to September 2006, Carolyn participated in over 200 combat patrols as a member of a Military Intelligence unit with the Georgia National Guard.

As of 2007, the Military Health System had recorded 43,779 patients with traumatic brain injuries from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It had recorded 39,365 patients with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to a Department of Defense report to Congress. By the end of September 2008, the number of patients with a preliminary diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from Veterans Affairs doctors had risen to 101,882 - more than 10 percent of veterans who have left the military and more than 20 percent of those who have gone to Veterans Affairs for medical treatment, according to a spokeswoman for Veterans Affairs.

Various veterans' issue-related news clips of the day...

* The syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is under fire because its defining criteria are too broad, leading to rampant overdiagnosis.\n * The flawed PTSD concept may mistake soldiers' natural process of adjustment to civilian life for dysfunction.\n * Misdiagnosed soldiers receive the wrong treatments and risk becoming mired in a Veterans Administration system that encourages chronic disability.\n

The Department of the Army has finally gone public and acknowledged the alarming rate of suicide among its ranks. While Army leadership is to be commended for breaking the barrier of silence regarding mental illness in the military, the underlying culture of secrecy that has contributed to the current trend is in dire need of reform.

What exactly is a "mental disorder"? For that matter, what criteria should determine whether any condition is a "disease" or a "disorder"? Is "disease" something like an oak tree-a physical object you can bump into or put your arms around? Or are terms like "disease" and "disorder" merely abstract, value-laden constructs, akin to "injustice" and "immorality"? Are categories of disease and disorder fundamentally different in psychiatry than in other medical specialties? And-by the way-how do the terms "disease," "disorder," "syndrome," "malady," "sickness," and "illness" differ? Anyone who believes there are easy or certain answers to these questions is either in touch with the Divine Mind, or out of touch with reality. To appreciate the complexity and ambiguity in this conceptual arena, consider this quote from the venerable Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry: "The term 'mental illness' is probably best used for those disorders that are intuitively most like bodily illness (or disease) and, yet, mental rather than bodily. This of course implies everything that is built into the mind-brain problem!"1(p11) In a single sentence, we are already grappling with the terms "illness," "disorder," and "disease," not to mention Cartesian psychology! And yet-daunting though these issues are-they are central to the practical task now before the DSM-V committees: figuring out what conditions ought to be included as psychiatric disorders.

The scans of 42 U.S. soldiers who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan in the recent past showed that, compared with healthy veterans, those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had marked differences in some areas of brain activity. The study, presented at the World Psychiatric Association Congress in Italy, suggested identifying certain brain patterns could one day help diagnose PTSD before symptoms appeared and better track treatment, the researchers said.