Neurotrauma / TBI
Start here.
A voluntary, lifetime injury and neurological-pattern screener for veterans, service members, first responders, military families, survivors, and people in high-risk occupations. If your history involves a brain, spine, blast, or hypoxic injury — whether or not it happened during military service — this is the right place to start.
What this is not
It does not diagnose a neurological condition. It is not a medical evaluation, a legal service, a VA or DoD claim, or an emergency service. Nothing you submit here authorizes Behind The 22 to contact VA, DoD, healthcare providers, attorneys, employers, family members, or anyone else on your behalf.
If you're worried this could get you in trouble — that's not what this is.
We're not investigating individuals, and we're not building a file on you. We're looking for patterns in how the system operates. Your experience is one data point in a pattern, not a case opened against anyone, including you. Read the full explanation of how we handle information like yours.
What this is
A pattern-identification tool that helps you organize your own history and helps Behind The 22 look for recurring, documented failure patterns across many people's experiences. Filling this out, on its own, is real and complete participation.
BEFORE YOU START, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER OR UPLOAD
Social Security numbers
VA claim numbers
DoD ID numbers
Full dates of birth
Home addresses
Medical record numbers
Photographs of identification
Passwords or banking information
When you're ready, the screener opens in a secure, HIPAA-compliant form. It takes most people 15–25 minutes, and you can stop and come back to it.
What happens after you submit: your screening is reviewed as part of our ongoing research. If it appears relevant to an area we're studying, we may invite you to a separate, more detailed process — this is never required, and you choose at the end of the form whether you're open to being contacted.
The evidence so far
What our research has already found
This screener isn't a blind guess about what to ask. It's built directly from a documented pattern we've already found across government reports, court records, and clinical research — summarized here so you can see what your answers are actually helping us test.
The pattern, in short
A real injury effect gets misread as something else — usually psychiatric — because the specific test, screening, or documentation step that would have caught the real cause never happened. Not because anyone hid it. Because the system is siloed enough that no one connects it.
Some of what we've documented so far: the single most-used TBI diagnosis code in an 18-year DoD dataset of 426,450 people was "Head injury, unspecified" — a code that doesn't confirm an injury even occurred. In independent research, 53% of confirmed severe brain injuries scored "mild" on the standard field test used right after an injury. VA's own studies found hormone-screening compliance after TBI at 0% and 8% against two different published standards. TBI is independently associated with 1.62 to 2.45 times higher suicide risk, separate from PTSD.
The full picture — every finding, every citation — is in the download below.
Learn about the anatomy of blast injuries
Learn about the anatomy of moderate/severe brain injuries
Learn about the anatomy of multiple TBIs
Learn about the anatomy of CTE
What correction actually looks like
The standard of care needs to cover the full injury profile — not just the parts that are easiest to see
Right now, VA and DoD's only TBI-specific clinical guideline covers mild TBI only, unchanged since 2009. Brain injury, spinal cord injury, autonomic function, hormone function, vision and vestibular symptoms, medication burden, and environmental exposure are all evaluated separately, if they're evaluated at all — instead of as one connected injury profile for the same person.
What's missing today
A moderate or severe TBI can get scored as mild by a field tool with a documented accuracy limitation, and nothing downstream is built to correct that score later. Hormone and autonomic screening are rarely done. VA runs entirely separate systems for TBI/polytrauma and spinal cord injury, even though a single blast or impact event can affect both.
What correction requires
One connected assessment covering brain, spine, autonomic, and hormone function together — not routed through separate specialties that never compare notes. Explicit rules against a psychiatric diagnosis closing off further neurological investigation. The same standard applied at private community-care providers, not just VA facilities, since most of the VA/DoD-connected population doesn't only receive care inside VA's own walls.
This is the specific standard our proposed legislation, the Comprehensive Neurotrauma Standard of Care Act, is built to require. You can read the full explainer on Our Research page.
Read it yourself
Download the two-page overview
Every finding above, plus the full numbered citation list so you can check each one yourself — compressed into a short, downloadable document.
The Neurotrauma Evidence Ecosystem
A four-page overview, fully cited
A mutual-aid and research organization correcting the root cause of institutional harm.
Behind The 22 is a mutual-aid and research organization. Nothing on this site is medical advice, legal advice, or a VA/DoD claim of any kind, and no information here should be used as a substitute for consulting a qualified medical or legal professional about your own situation. Case information we collect is handled under a written consent protocol and is used, in de-identified and aggregated form, to identify recurring patterns never to authorize us to contact any agency, provider, or third party on a person's behalf without separate, explicit permission.
If you're in crisis right now: call or text 988, then press 1, or chat at veteranscrisisline.net
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