DVA Compensation for Mental Health: PTSD, Depression and Anxiety

Mental health is the largest area of DVA claiming and the one where veterans most often leave money and treatment on the table — usually by claiming one condition when the record supports four, or by waiting years for a psychiatrist appointment they may not have needed.

This is the compensation side, end to end. If you want treatment funded right now without any of this, read non-liability health care first — it is faster, and it does not depend on a claim.

What compensation is actually available

“Compensation” is not one payment. An accepted mental health condition can open several, and they stack:

Initial Liability (IL) — not money in itself, but the gateway. DVA accepts the condition as service-related, which makes treatment for it funded and everything below possible.
Permanent Impairment (PI) — compensation for the lasting effect of the condition, paid as a lump sum, periodic payments, or a combination. Mental health conditions are rated under GARP Chapter 4, which measures the effect on relationships, work and social function, self-care and treatment response.
Incapacity payments — income replacement if the condition reduces your ability to work.
Treatment — funded for the accepted condition, plus the pathways an accepted condition opens over time.

Which Act applies (MRCA, DRCA or VEA) depends on when you served, and it changes how PI is calculated and what else is available. That is worth getting right early rather than discovering it at determination.

The diagnosis rule changed — and most veterans have not heard

Until recently, DVA policy required a psychiatrist to diagnose any mental health condition for an initial liability claim. In practice that meant waiting months for an appointment before a claim could even be lodged properly.

In September 2025 DVA expanded it. For anxiety and depressive conditions, DVA will now accept a diagnosis from:

a treating General Practitioner — a GP with an ongoing treating relationship with you;
a treating Clinical Psychologist — likewise, an ongoing treating relationship;
Clinical Psychologist reports produced through Defence's Medical Employment Classification Review (MECR) process;
Clinical Psychologist reports obtained during service or within one year of separation from the ADF.

Diagnoses must be made against DSM-5 criteria, and in most cases the required diagnostic information goes on the Injury and Disease Details Sheet. DVA may still request a fuller report, and complex cases may still be referred to a psychiatrist.

PTSD is the exception. A PTSD diagnosis for a liability claim still requires a specialist psychiatrist, with a report conforming to the Repatriation Commission's Guidelines for Psychiatric Compensation Claims. So if you have been told “you need a psychiatrist” for a depression or anxiety claim, that may no longer be true — but for PTSD it still is.

The practical effect: a veteran with depression or anxiety and a regular GP can now often get a claim properly diagnosed in weeks rather than waiting the better part of a year.

The most expensive mistake: claiming PTSD only

Ask a veteran what they are claiming and the answer is usually “PTSD”. It is the condition everyone has heard of. It is also, statistically, one of the harder mental health conditions to get accepted — and claiming it alone leaves the rest of the picture unclaimed.

Look at the Statements of Principles themselves. Counting the factors in the current instruments:

Posttraumatic stress disorder — 13 factors, and the core ones require a defined category 1A or 1B stressor before clinical onset. A tightly drawn gateway.
Depressive disorder — 51 factors.
Anxiety disorder — 49 factors.
Alcohol use disorder — 23 factors.

Depression and anxiety have roughly four times as many routes to acceptance as PTSD, covering far more than combat exposure — and many veterans who cannot satisfy a PTSD stressor factor comfortably satisfy a depressive or anxiety factor on the same history.

Comorbidity is the norm, not the exception. PTSD commonly travels with major depressive disorder, an anxiety disorder and alcohol use disorder, and each is separately diagnosable, separately claimable, and separately rated for impairment. Where more than one psychiatric disorder is diagnosed, DVA is required to investigate and determine each separately.

And note the first factor in the alcohol use disorder SoP: having a clinically significant disorder of mental health as specified at the time of the clinical onset of alcohol use disorder. In plain terms, alcohol use disorder can be accepted as flowing from an already-accepted mental health condition — a sequela route that veterans almost never claim.

What the SoP factors actually require

Every mental health claim is decided against the Statement of Principles for that specific condition. The factors are concrete, and the evidence has to engage them concretely:

Stressor-based factors — experiencing a category 1A or 1B stressor (defined terms in the instrument, covering things like life-threatening events, serious injury, witnessing death) before clinical onset. PTSD runs almost entirely on these; depression and anxiety include them within a five-year window but offer many other routes as well.
Non-stressor factors — the reason depression and anxiety have fifty-odd factors. They reach into physical illness, substance use, chronic pain, sleep disturbance, relationship breakdown and much more.
Clinical onset — when the condition first manifested, which is a medical finding made from your records rather than the date someone finally named it. It matters, because the windows in many factors run to clinical onset.

“Stress”, “low mood” and “not coping” are symptoms, not conditions, and cannot be assessed against any SoP. A named DSM-5 diagnosis is the minimum entry ticket.

How the claim runs, step by step

Get treatment started now via non-liability health care. It costs nothing, needs no diagnosis, and creates a treatment record.
Get the record read. Service and civilian medical records routinely document conditions the veteran has forgotten or never connected — that is what a chart review is for.
Get diagnosed properly — every condition present, not just the obvious one; GP or clinical psychologist for depression and anxiety, psychiatrist for PTSD.
Document the stressors and the history concretely: what happened, when, where, your role. Enough to engage the factor, which is not the same as writing everything down in detail.
Lodge each condition — MyService takes one condition per Initial Liability claim, so four conditions means four claims, each with its own evidence. See how to submit and how to upload the documents.
Permanent impairment, when the conditions are stable — rated under GARP Chapter 4. Our Mental Health PIA Estimate works your answers against those tables in advance so you know roughly where you sit before the formal assessment. To see what one looks like finished, there is a full worked example on the permanent impairment page (simulated patient, 54 impairment points).

If a claim is refused

Mental health claims are refused most often for one of three reasons: no DSM-5 diagnosis from an accepted provider; a stressor that was not documented well enough to engage a factor; or — the most common and most beatable — nothing in the service medical records from the relevant time.

That last one is not the end of the claim, and DVA's own policy says so. We have set out the law, the policy and the case authority here: what to do when DVA rejects your claim because there is nothing in your medical file. You also have formal review rights — see VRB and determination appeals.

Talk to us

We read the whole record, diagnose what is there, and write the medical evidence each Statement of Principles asks for — every condition, not just the famous one. Fixed fee, never a percentage of your compensation. Call 0429 146 039 or email reception@vhc.org.au for a no-obligation consult with the Veterans Health Centre in Ipswich, Queensland.

If you are struggling right now, Open Arms — Veterans and Families Counselling is free, confidential and available 24/7 on 1800 011 046.

DVA Compensation for Mental Health Conditions: PTSD, Depression and Anxiety