Alleging misdiagnoses, veterans’ advocates battle Army

“We really have an obligation to go back and make sure troops weren’t misdiagnosed,’’ said Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, a clinical psychologist whose nonprofit, Give an Hour, connects troops with volunteer mental health professionals.

The Army denies that any soldier was misdiagnosed before 2008, when it drastically cut the number of discharges due to personality disorders and diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorders skyrocketed.

Unlike PTSD, which the Army regards as a treatable mental disability caused by the acute stresses of war, the military designation of a personality disorder can have devastating consequences for soldiers.

Defined as a “deeply ingrained maladaptive pattern of behavior,’’ a personality disorder is considered a “preexisting condition’’ that relieves the military of its duty to pay for the person’s health care or combat-related disability pay.

According to figures provided by the Army, the service discharged about 1,000 soldiers a year between 2005 and 2007 for having a personality disorder.

After an article in The Nation magazine exposed the practice, the Defense Department changed its policy and began requiring a top-level review of each case to ensure that post-traumatic stress or a brain injury was not the underlying cause.

After that, the annual number of personality disorder cases dropped by 75 percent. Only 260 soldiers were discharged on those grounds in 2009.

At the same time, the number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases has soared. By 2008, more than 14,000 soldiers had been diagnosed with PTSD, twice as many as two years before.

The Army attributes the sudden and sharp reduction in personality disorders to its policy change. Yet Army officials deny that soldiers were discharged unfairly, saying they reviewed the paperwork of all deployed soldiers dismissed with a personality disorder between 2001 and 2006.

“We did not find evidence that soldiers with PTSD had been inappropriately discharged with personality disorder,’’ wrote Maria Tolleson, a spokeswoman at the US Army Medical Command, which oversees the health care of soldiers, in an e-mail.

Command officials declined to be interviewed.