Veterans Disability Compensation
Traumatic Brain Injury is a condition that has been slowly more understood over the last few years. What happens when you’re exposed to a serious explosion or a fall in a bed injury or even a head injury without a fall is that your brain actually moves inside your head — the brain sort of floats in liquid. And the result is to literally bounce the brain inside your skull with potential damage to the brain tissue.
And what happens in a traumatic brain injury case is that the damage to the brain results in various limitations on how the brain functions and can vary dramatically depending on the severity of the blow and where in the brain the actual injury is. Different areas result in different problems, but it can be relatively minor or can be quite severe. People with severe traumatic brain injury for example, often have trouble with organization with memory with decision-making.
Many times these in certain incidents are accompanied by post event headaches or just a general feeling that you not functioning right.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a new term for an old problem. Solider have always suffered from horrors that they run into in combat. PTSD is a term that was coined around 1980 to talk about the emotional impact of those incidents on human being. And you see it particularly in veterans who have returned from heavy combat. In World War II, it was called “war neurosis,” things like that, “combat neurosis.”
But it became known as PTSD around 1980 when the Vietnam Veterans, and it’s very common unfortunately with veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, seeing heavy combat, seeing comrades killed. Unfortunately, it’s not a readily detectable problem because there are no external signs that someone suffers from it in the usual sense. It’s not like someone who is shot or wounded from a mine, so it’s a much more subtle problem to detect, but very disabling to many people.
Unfortunately, it’s very common for those who’ve been exposed to combat — and it also comes up in other surprising contexts, even those who haven’t been overseas.
Women veterans unfortunately sometimes suffer from sexual assault, either by other service personnel or by others and it is a frequent problem from those kinds of incidents or any sort of threatening personal injury producing kind of situation.
It is a problem that unfortunately doesn’t show up quickly as a rule. Many of the Vietnam veterans, for example, didn’t really realize that they had PTSD for many years. It’s just over time, it becomes apparent that they have trouble dealing with other people, being around loud noises, and simply don’t function well in society. And so it’s in many ways an insidious problem, but very disabling, particular if it goes untreated over time.