67% of Separating Troops Screen Positive but Screening Tools Are Unvalidated

Between May 2023 and April 2024, VA contractors administered approximately 50,500 Joint Separation Health Assessments to departing service members. Roughly 67% screened positive for at least one mental health condition, primarily PTSD and depression. Yet a 2025 GAO report found that the screening questions used for some mental health conditions on the VA-DOD separation health assessment have not been fully validated -- meaning they have never been tested or determined to be effective and reliable at identifying the conditions they purport to screen for. This creates a paradox: two-thirds of transitioning service members flag positive, but neither DOD nor VA can be confident these are true positives, false positives, or -- more dangerously -- that the tools are missing true negatives. Service members who screen positive but receive no follow-up lose trust in the system. Those who are missed entirely enter civilian life without any mental health support connection. Only 32-43% of service members who screen positive report receiving any mental health care in the prior 12 months, revealing a massive gap between identification and treatment. The structural problem is that the separation health assessment was designed as an administrative checkbox rather than a clinical diagnostic tool. It exists to document a service member's health status at separation for future VA claims purposes, not to trigger immediate intervention. The DOD and VA operate separate health systems with separate records, and the handoff between them at separation is a known failure point. Validating screening instruments requires longitudinal clinical research -- tracking outcomes over years -- and neither DOD nor VA has invested in validating the specific questions used at the transition point, despite the assessment being administered to tens of thousands of service members annually.