The Depression and Anxiety Pack

What you get

• What the Board did with 223,475 issues about this: granted, denied, and sent back.
• The current rating criteria, the ones an examiner measures against, read from the eCFR.
• Every condition the Board has seen claimed because of this one, and how often each was granted.
• The same list the other way round, because the Board does not treat the two directions alike.
• How often a medical opinion, the veteran's own statements, or an inadequate exam show up in the ones that were granted against the ones that were not.
• Real decisions to read yourself, linked to the Board's own website.

Not every pairing goes the same way. The Board granted 70 percent of the decided migraines and headaches claims and 19 percent of the eyes and vision ones. Knowing which is which before you file is the point of this.

What it isn't

It is not a form, not a template to send the VA, and not advice about your claim. We teach. We do not file for you, and we are not lawyers, not a VSO, and not the VA.

It doesn't know anything about you, and it never asks. That's the point. There's nothing to sign up for and no medical detail to hand over.

Where the numbers come from

The Board of Veterans' Appeals publishes every decision it makes. We have indexed 1,501,587 of them. 192,083 involve depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions, and the pack is built from those and from the rating criteria the VA publishes. Nothing in it is an estimate.

A Board decision binds only the case it decided. None of them is a rule that has to be followed in yours.