02/21/2026
One of our key initiatives as a veteran support community is to ensure that clear and accurate legislative and policy information is widely shared. This is especially critical for veterans who receive disability ratings for mental health conditions resulting from trauma experienced during active duty.
In this case, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) made policy and administrative decisions affecting how mental health conditions are evaluated during Compensation & Pension (C&P) examinations. These decisions were implemented without meaningful public input from veterans, veteran advocacy organizations, or affected families.
Many veterans return home and responsibly seek mental health treatment through therapy, medication, and other supports. When that treatment stabilizes their condition, the VA’s current evaluation framework may interpret that stability as “improvement.”
As a result, veterans can face a reduction in their disability rating specifically because treatment is working. In some cases, this reduction may also place continued access to VA-provided mental health services and medications at risk—services that are medically necessary and ongoing.
Veterans should not be penalized for complying with treatment or achieving clinical stability. Decisions that directly impact disability ratings and access to care must be made transparently, with full veteran participation, and without circumventing public input from the very community these policies affect.
On Feb. 17, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) published an Interim final rule that effectively nullifies existing case law by creating a new default rule whereby veterans will be rated in their medicated state during a C&P exam. Veterans who use medications to manage symptoms where signif...
