The United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan has quietly sidestepped regulations that bar women from jobs in ground combat. Thus, more women than ever before are suffering mental anguish as a result in this historic shift. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress. Currently, there are at least 3,000 female veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder with no disability benefit, as shown by the Veteran Affairs statistics.

According to therapists, case workers, and female patients, the discrepancy between the number of male and female veterans receiving benefits is because military regulations governing women’s roles have not caught up with reality, so women must work harder to prove they saw combat and deserve benefits. While rejection rates are impossible to determine because the V.A. did not provide the number of men and women who applied for benefits, the statistics show that as of July 2009, 57, 732 male Iraq or Afghanistan veterans had received disability benefits for the stress disorder, compared with 5,103 females.

Male and female combatants are emerging as psychological equals, according to Officials with the Department of Defense whose initial studies of male and female veterans with similar time-served  showed that mental health issues arose in roughly the same proportion for members of each sex. Colonel Carl Castro, director of the Military Operational Research Program at the Department of Defense said, “Female soldiers are actually handing and dealing with the stress of combat as well as male soldiers are.”  However, the difference between male and female veterans lies in the way they cope with post-traumatic stress, which varies depending on the circumstances of military life and the way women are received when they return home. Since combat is generally viewed as an all-male activity, women have stated that they do not feel their problems would be recognized as valid. While the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs have worked hard to make the public more aware of the increasing involvement of women in combat, a large sector of United States society remains ignorant to the psychological scars of such roles.

To read more about female soldiers and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, refer to the New York Times Series: Women at Arms: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/us/series/women_at_arms/index.html