While the number of veterans discharged for “personality disorder” has dropped dramatically in the last two years, the numbers of service members diagnosed with adjustment disorder has climbed, leading veterans’ groups to charge Wednesday that the military may be playing a shell game to deny benefits to combat veterans.
The allegation is connected to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New Haven by the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School, on behalf of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) and VVA Chapter 120 in Hartford.
The lawsuit charges that nearly 26,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been wrongly classified as suffering from personality disorder, a diagnosis that renders a service member ineligible to receive full military benefits.
