Depression: From Board Denial to Court Reversal

Name: Depression Board Denials on Appeal — CAVC Reversal Patterns
Creator: VetAid

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: the 843 opinions and orders the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims chose to publish (1996–2026), taken from the Court's own site and read by rule — the disposition from each decision's holding sentence, the reasoning type and conditions from the decision text, and every quoted passage verbatim from the cited decision with the veteran's name removed. No model summaries. Of 1,201 published documents, 83 petitions, 144 attorney-fee (EAJA) decisions, 48 procedural orders, 2 unreadable files, 8 documents without a docket number are excluded and 73 could not be classified, leaving 843. Published decisions are not all decisions: the Court decides roughly 8–9,000 appeals a year, most by unpublished single-judge decision or on the parties' joint motion; the official disposition counts below come from the Court's annual report, never from this sample. Selection effect: only Board decisions a veteran chose to appeal reach the Court, so no figure here describes all Board denials. Data build: 2026-10-07 (method v2, September 2026 — replaces an earlier build that used machine summaries of a mixed-court search corpus).

Step 1 — Depression at the Board

From our issue-level parse of 1,929,585 public Board decisions (dated 1992-03-30 to 2026-07-31; archive years 1992–2025 complete; 2026 partial, added as the Board publishes; Board data build 2026-10-07):

Issues decided

106,851

Granted

28.1% (30,062)

Denied

25.9% (27,681)

Remanded

39.8% (42,503)

Open these issues in the Board decision finder (filter by judge, years, outcome or evidence; links to each decision on va.gov). Full Board-level tables: outcome rates by condition · judge statistics.

Step 2 — published Court decisions that mention depression

Published CAVC decisions mentioning depression

Board decision disturbed

50.6% (43)

What the Court said the Board got wrong — verbatim

CAVC No. 21-6977 · 2024 · published other · reasoning: reasons or bases

“Yet, the Board did not discuss this opinion in its decision, an omission that further undermines the adequacy of the Board's reasons or bases.”

CAVC No. 17-0794 · 2018 · published order · reasoning: unclassified

“Second, the Board failed to apply to the appellant's case the statutes, regulations, and caselaw governing severance of service connection.”

CAVC No. 10-3605 · 2013 · published opinion · reasoning: duty to assist

“Because the Board failed to discuss whether the evidence of record indicated that there may be an association between the appellant's current disability and VA treatment, it provided inadequate reasons or bases for its determination that the duty to assist was met.”

CAVC No. 05-0355 · 2010 · published opinion · reasoning: tdiu

“Accordingly, the Board erred in not addressing TDIU and it must do so on remand.”

Each passage is the Court's own sentence from the cited published decision, with the veteran's name removed; the reasoning label is a keyword tag for the decision as a whole. Read the full decision at the Court's opinions page or by docket number at CourtListener. A holding that fit one record does not guarantee it fits another.

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