Panetta orders military-wide review of mental health cases

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday that the Pentagon has ordered all of the services to undertake reviews of their mental health diagnoses over the past decade, further expanding a review amid a scandal involving changed PTSD diagnoses.

Panetta said at a Senate hearing that he was expanding the mental health review beyond the Army, which earlier this month announced details of a service-wide examination going back a decade to 2001.

“What I've asked is the other service chiefs to implement the same approach that the Army's taken here,” Panetta said.

“There are still huge gaps in terms of the differences, in terms of how they approach these cases, and how they diagnose the cases and how they deal with them, and frankly, that's a whole area we have to do much better on,” he said.

The Army said it would conduct the review in the wake of a number of PTSD diagnoses at Joint Base Lewis-McChord that were incorrectly downgraded.

Senate Veterans Affairs Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who represents the Lewis-McChord, has pushed the military to go back and look at its mental health evaluation systems. She told Panetta Wednesday that “the Pentagon and the VA are losing the battle on mental and behavioral health conditions.”

---