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Depression: From Board Denial to Court Reversal

The two-step reality of a depression appeal: what the Board does with these issues, and — when veterans appeal a denial to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims — the arguments that get Board denials set aside.

What this is computed from: 30,584 decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, identified inside a 39,330-document public court-decision corpus and summarized by machine analysis. Every docket number shown below was verified to appear in the court's published decision text in that corpus (112 verified; 0 candidate examples were dropped for failing verification). Selection effect: only Board decisions a veteran chose to appeal reach the Court — most Board denials are never appealed, so these rates describe appealed cases, not all denials. Data build: 2026-08-16.

Step 1 — Depression at the Board

From our issue-level parse of 18,313 public Board decisions (dated 2026-01-02 to 2026-03-02; corpus ingest in progress):

Issues decided
2,260
Granted
34.9%
Denied
27.7%
Remanded
27.8%

Full Board-level tables: outcome rates by condition · judge statistics.

Step 2 — appealed denials at the Court

CAVC cases analyzed involving depression
4,270
Board decision disturbed
53.5% (2,283)

Arguments that won — verified dockets

CAVC docket 05-0174 · verified · denial type: credibility

Board improperly dismissed veteran's lay statements of continuity of symptomatology as nexus opinions

CAVC docket 11-1064 · verified · denial type: no nexus

VA conceded duty-to-assist error in not returning a medical report to the examiner for clarification

CAVC docket 17-3989 · verified · denial type: not new material

Board failed to properly apply the regulation governing reconsideration after receipt of new service department records

CAVC docket 19-8769 · verified · denial type: duty to assist

Board relied on an inadequate medical examination for the PTSD claim

Argument summaries are machine-extracted from the cited public court decisions and lightly compressed; read the full decision by searching the docket number at CourtListener or the Court's own public search. A cited argument working in one record does not guarantee it fits another.

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