I have a 70% rating for PTSD and I recently spent 3.5 months in a VA psych ward. There are a lot of guys that I've seen who have higher ratings than me who symptoms that are substantially less severe than my own.
One guy that I saw in the psych ward was hit in the head with a beer bottle in the late eighties during a bar-fight when he was stationed in Germany. He claims that he has PTSD from that incident and was very upset that he didn't also have a TBI (traumatic brain injury) after the VA performed a MRI on him. Another guy fell off of a porch and claimed that gave him PTSD. It's crazy.
Then I spent 13 months in Iraq as an Infantry Platoon Leader and dealt with numerous firefights and small arms engagements, was blown up multiple times by IEDs, had a hand grenade blow up 15 feet from me, lost 5 Soldiers, dealt extensively with dead, dying, and mutilated bodies (I was a combat medic before I became an officer). I can hardly hold a job and I constantly struggle with suicide and all of the other wonderful things that goes with it and I can't get a rating like the guys I mentioned above. My life and my relationships are a mess and I struggle to keep myself out of the psych ward every day. I totally expect that I'll either be locked up in a psych ward or dead within a year.
My wife and coworkers are constantly scared of me as they think I'm going to go all "murder-suicide" on them. My life is a mess.
Sometimes it really gets to me, but I realize that I mostly just need to focus on myself and not worry about the people scamming the system.
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