Pursuing a Mental Health Disability Claim: Military-Related PTSD, Depression & TBI
Video Transcript
Hello, I’m Eric Gang, the Veterans Disability Attorney. I want to talk to you a little more today about an area that concerns mental disabilities. Basically, it’s a situation where you may file a claim for PTSD, and the VA sends you to a doctor. They examine you and they come back and say you don’t have PTSD; you actually have depression. So the VA in turn then denies the claim for PTSD on the grounds that you have depression.
Well, that’s a little unfair because you thought you had PTSD, but you actually had depression, and the symptoms are so close you really didn’t know.
The Court’s Ruling on Changing Diagnoses
Fortunately, a few years ago the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a decision to address this issue. The bottom line is that if you make a claim for one mental disability, but through the process they determine that you actually have a different disability, then they are required to consider service-connecting you for that other disability.
In our example, they need to consider service-connecting you for depression even though you don’t have PTSD, so long as that depression can be related to your military service. It’s very important to understand.
The Bottom Line Principle
The bottom line principle is this: a claim for one mental disability could include claims for other mental disabilities that are ascertained upon medical diagnosis.
Again, you as a medical layperson are making a claim based on the symptoms you’re experiencing. You don’t necessarily know the intricacies of the DSM-4 and all the psychiatric lingo that these doctors use. All you know is that you feel depressed, you feel anxious, you feel nervous, and you’re going to make a claim for what you think it is.
The doctors may come up with a label that’s different than the label you thought it was. That in and of itself should not be enough to cause your claim to be denied.
Seeking Help with Your Claim
So I want to encourage you if you’re fighting a mental disability claim—you think it’s PTSD but maybe it’s something else, you don’t know—but you find yourself in a situation where the VA is denying that claim. I want to encourage you to consult legal counsel if you’re in the appeals process.
We have a lot of resources available on this website, and I encourage you to take advantage of those free educational resources here on the site. Or, if you’d like to try and see how we may be able to help you, then I would encourage you to contact our office.