President Obama announced in his weekly address on Saturday that starting today, a new claims process for military veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will be established to make it easier to receive benefits and care. “We have a solemn responsibility to provide our veterans and wounded warriors with the care and benefits they’ve earned when they come home,” the President said. “In past wars, [PTSD] wasn’t something America always talked about. And as a result, our troops and their families often felt stigmatized or embarrassed when it came to seeking help,” Obama noted, adding that “we’ve made it clear up and down the chain of command that folks should seek help if they need it.” A senior administration official said the new process will make it “a lot easier” for veterans suffering from PTSD “because the threshold has been liberalized to the point where it’s much easier to verify.”

THE NEED FOR CHANGE: In 2008, the RAND Corp. found that among 300,000 servicemembers, nearly one in five veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan showed symptoms of PTSD or major depression, and only half of those sought treatment. The study found that lax PTSD diagnosis and treatment will cost the military as much as $6.2 billion in the two years following deployment and “[i]nvesting in more high-quality treatment could save close to $2 billion within two years by substantially reducing those indirect costs.” Indeed, Obama administration officials noted that while benefits will likely be granted to more veterans, it will be “quicker and easier and therefore less costly per case.” “There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said RAND’s Terri Tanielian at the time of the study’s release. “Unfortunately, we found there are many barriers preventing them from getting the high-quality treatment they need.” In another study last year, the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) “found that more than one-third of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who enrolled in the veterans health system after 2001 were diagnosed with a mental health problem, the most common being post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.” Mental health issues are related to other problems veterans confront, such as drug addiction and homelessness. And as of last year, five U.S. soldiers try to commit suicide every day compared to one per day before the Iraq war began.

A NEW STREAMLINED PROCESS: Under the new guidelines — applicable not only to those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in previous conflicts — veterans will not have to document what caused their PTSD. Instead, they will now only be required “to show a diagnosis of PTSD and that it was related to service overall, not a specific event.” “I don’t think our troops on the battlefield should have to take notes to keep for a claims application,” Obama said. “And I’ve met enough veterans to know that you don’t have to engage in a firefight to endure the trauma of war.” Under the old guidelines, veterans advocates argued that it “could be impossible for veterans to find records of a firefight or bomb blast.” The old rules also “ignored other causes of PTSD, such as fearing a traumatic event even if it doesn’t occur,” which could “discriminate against female troops prohibited from serving on front lines and against those who don’t experience combat directly.” The new regulations acknowledge that the nature of military conflicts, past and present, include “guerrilla warfare, insurgent activities where stressors may include constant vigilance against unexpected attack, the absence of a defined frontline, the difficulty of distinguishing enemy combatants from civilians, and the ubiquity of improvised explosive devices.”

YEARS OF NEGLECT: As Center for American Progress analysts Lawrence Korb, Sean Duggan, Max Bergmann, and Peter Juul have noted, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the first conflicts since WWII in which service members have been asked to undertake multiple deployments without adequate time at home between tours to rest and recuperate. During two terms in office, the Bush administration did not do nearly enough to safeguard the health and readiness of the U.S. armed forces. Bush officials regularly downplayed the scourge of PTSD, and often times, reports from the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs on the numbers of troops diagnosed with PTSD were “disturbingly low” — suggesting that the administration understated cases of mental disorder resulting from war. In the latter years of the Bush presidency, e-mails leaked from the VA revealed that agency employees were discouraged from diagnosing soldiers and veterans with PTSD. One e-mail complained of “compensation seeking veterans” and urged VA staff to rule out PTSD and “consider a diagnosis of ‘Adjustment Disorder'” instead. Moreover, in 2008, then-VA Secretary James Peake suggested that PTSD and traumatic brain injury have been “overblown.” While Peake said that brain injuries are serious, he downplayed what veterans experience “to what anyone who played football in their youth might have suffered.” Veterans with mental disorders were even being used to test new drugs. In 2008, the Washington Times reported that “mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects.” During his confirmation hearing, current VA Secretary Gen. Eric Shinseki (ret.) promised to make the VA a “21st-century organization” that meets the needs of a growing population of wounded veterans. Indeed, Obama’s 2010 budget for the VA emphasizes a veteran-centric commitment by expanding services by 15.5 percent over 2009, the largest percentage increase for the VA requested by a president in more than 30 years.

Progress Report: from the ThinkProgress.org site