Primary sources first

Inspector general reports, GAO findings, court opinions, agency and provider policy read directly, not summarized secondhand, and cited precisely, whether the source is a public agency or a private organization.

Real cases, handled carefully

Every case submitted to us is reviewed under a written consent and handling protocol, with particular care around cases involving a death.

Tiered, not inflated

We label what's a documented fact and what's our own interpretation connecting those facts every time, without exception.

Built to be picked apart

Every claim we make is drawn from public documentation and hard evidence, on purpose, so it can be independently checked by attorneys, clinicians, journalists, historians, and oversight bodies, not just by us. The more people who can verify this kind of work themselves, the stronger it gets.

Our current work

Every case file below shares the same starting point: we're looking for preventable causes of harm. Sometimes that means a rule that exists but wasn't followed. Just as often, it means the rule, tool, or training itself was never built to do the job - a screening instrument that structurally can't capture the full injury, a policy that quietly excludes a group it should cover, a workflow inherited from a system that was already broken.

Suicide risk is part of that picture in every case file it isn't split off into its own separate category. Treating suicide as a purely mental-health problem hasn't moved the numbers. Real, physical, treatable causes - brain injury, chronic pain, hormone imbalance, autonomic dysfunction, sleep disruption, toxic exposure - can independently raise suicide risk, and a system built to screen for psychiatric causes alone will keep missing them. Every project we run accounts for that, on purpose.

Current Projects

Neurotrauma / TBI standard of care

A full evidence core examining how traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, and their downstream hormonal and autonomic effects get diagnosed, coded, and compensated across VA and DoD and where the correction mechanisms that exist for other conditions are missing entirely.

Active

PTSD, mental health, and substance use disorder

Examining how psychiatric and substance-use diagnoses interact with the same operational and workflow failures already documented on the neurotrauma side including how a psychiatric diagnosis can close off a physical workup before one is ever completed.

Future Project

Toxic and environmental exposure

Burn pits, jet fuels, solvents, heavy metals, and other occupational exposures how they're screened for, documented, and connected (or not) to the health effects that follow.

Future Project

VA/DoD benefits ecosystem

The claims and benefits process itself as its own system including the ecosystem of people and organizations who help veterans file claims, where that support works, and where it fails the people relying on it.

Future Project

Military sexual trauma (MST)

An emerging case file examining how MST is screened for, documented, and connected to downstream care applying the same operational and workflow lens already used across our other research.

Future Project

Forthcoming

Additional case files will open as our research and case collection identify the next pattern worth a dedicated investigation.

Planned

What's coming next

Two tools we're building to make this research usable by everyone, not just us

Both of these are still in development. This section will be updated with real links as each one goes live.

Free public research library

A public library of everything we've found and everything we submit with our work: the public documentation and data behind each project. This will not include any personal information we've collected from participants; it's built entirely from public records, the same evidence anyone could independently verify.

We're building it on Omeka.

In development

Interactive institutional timeline

A mapped timeline of the research, operational, workflow, and policy history of major institutions - what worked, what failed, and why/ what historical knowledge are we forgetting, so we can learn from both past function and past failure. We also intend to map current operational architecture against historical patterns of past successes and failures, to catch problems before they happen rather than after. The goal isn't just accountability. It's improving safety for everyone, including the institutions themselves and it turns out that's less expensive than most people assume.

In development

Ready to add your experience to this research? Every case file above has its own screener.

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.

Check out our Substack