My Support Forums - View Single Post - Advised to apply for SSDI by my doctor and very scared.

Rose76 · 11:41 PM

I really appreciate the feedback. I re-read these replies and think real hard on the options.

Here's what I have come to in my mind. I think I should get a lawyer. HOWEVER, I want to start the process as if I didn't have any lawyer. I am ordering some books an other materials used by people who file on their own. I plan to do all I can to get together everything that the books tell you to get together. By going at it, as if it were all on me to do it, I will pay attention to all the rules and regulations and criteria for approval of claims.

It's been my experience that if you want a lawyer to give you good service, it's a good idea to get educated about what the lawyer is supposed to be doing. So I plan to get as educated on this subject as I can get.

Because I put feelers out in the NET, I got a bunch of calls back from law firms just dying to take my case. I learned some important things from these conversations. One thing I learned is that, in the beginning, some law firms leave all the work to their paralegals. I'm not so sure a paralegal would do all that much better of a job than I would do myself. One paralegal told me how she just plugs in my answers to her questions into the firm's software, and the software "populates" a claim form with what "data" she has given it (gleaned from her conversation with me). I would rather "populate" that claim form my own self. I think I would give more detailed answers, which I've heard can make or break the case. Plus, I would take more time to think about my responses.

I know it takes a lot of work to become a paralegal and I'm sure they know lots that I don't. On the other hand, I happen to be a nurse. I might have a surer grasp about how some aspects of my psych disorder interfere with my competence on the job. Nobody knows my psych situation as well as I do myself. Nobody has the firsthand experience that I've had about how I have "decompensated" in work venues under the sort of stresses that I have not handled well and am not likely to ever do well with.

Ideally, I'ld like to procede as though I didn't have a lawyer. Except - I would run everything by an attorney before submitting it to the SSA. That way the attorney could tell me where I am lacking in knowledge about how to go about things. I'll probably get turned down once or twice. Then, if I go before an adjudicator, I would want a competent attorney, who's been following my claim, with me. I've read that it's a good idea to do that.

I think it is easier for the SSA to decline a claim like mine that is based on psychological problems than if I had something like advanced rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, I knew of an individual who had advanced RA and was turned down. To me his right to SSDI should have been a no-brainer, but he got turned down. I think he was too demoralized to appeal. It showed me what awful things can happen in that system.

Sometimes I think I don't really have a right to SSDI. I start thinking that the only reason I am depressed is that I let myself get that way, and that there is nothing wrong with me other than my own failure to push myself to take care of my responsibilities.

I think I'm going to go both ways at once. I think I'm going to put in a claim for SSDI, and, meanwhile, I will try my best to get and succeed at some kind of a job. Then whatever works out, works out. Mainly, I've got to get out of bed and stay our of bed and do something. I'll do the best I can to get back into the workforce, but I will make sure I get my psych problems well documented and keep a good paper trail of the psych difficulties I have. Luckily for me, I know how sloppy medical records often are. I will start making it my business to become knowledgeable about my past medical records - and they are quite extensive. I will ask pdocs to tell me exactly what diagnoses they are documenting.

Where I get my care, the pdocs are residents and they do a crummy job of keeping track of what meds they have prescribed me. So I think I will see if the pharmacies where I have gotten scripts filled can give me a print out of meds I've picked up.

A really good paralegal told me that it makes a big difference if I have a doctors who are supportive of my putting in a claim. Well, my PCP-MD is. Soon I will have a real heart to heart with my pdoc about how we have to have an explicit goal. That would be that I recover enough to be able to survive in the employment arena, or we establish evidence supporting that I have a claim for disability worthy of serious consideration by the SSA. A nurse at the psych facility where I go for care actually told me that these resident pdocs often need to be pushed into making themselves useful in helping me prepare evidence to support my claim.

I really would rather not be disabled. It's not how I think of myself. Yet, as far back as 2003, I was getting advised by counselors to apply for SSDI. It seems that I am able to function very well for intervals of time, even getting accolades for my diligent, conscientious performance. Then I will encounter a stressor that challenges a part of me that is weak and find myself pitifully overwhelmed and cope poorly and sometimes get fired. It is hard for me to know what to think of myself. The new doctor I just got is saying I am on the Bipolar Spectrum. I wish I knew more about what that means. He says he bases this on my seeming to be constantly moving around on a cycle - doing well, doing rotten, doing well, doing rotten . . . being a mature, capable person, then being an irritable jerk, and back around again. He says that intense irritability that comes and goes cyclically is a hallmark of Bipolar Spectrum disorder, as in Bipolar Type II. I have never met anyone quite like myself. My pdoc says he has met a lot of people like me. Well, I wish he'ld introduce me to one of them. I feel like I am just bizarre.

I have gotten so angry at my new pdoc because I feel like he knows nothing of what I go through. I may be wrong. He seems decent and surprisingly patient. I hope he can help me. But I don't believe medication is the holy grail. That's why I am planning to go swimming tomorrow. Medication has been helpful to me in important ways. But my state of mind is still very bad. If I can come out of that pool tomorrow with the sensation of "glowing" that I used to get back when I used to swim, them I will have some hope that my mind and body can contribute to healing itself.

In this long post, I am trying to talk myself into getting some hope. Having no hope is an awful bad place to be and I have been there since the second week of January. It is a state of mind that is not sustainable. I was even thinking that, at as a middle age woman, it is just too late to regain what's been lost.

I'll go to the pool tomorrow and bring a sandwhich to eat after my swim. I will try to be friendly with others I meet there. I will stay in the lounge area and read for awhile. I am so excited thinking up this plan. It means I will leave my apartment. This apartment has come to seem like my mausoleum. I must get out of it.

This is a long post, but, even if no one but me reads it, I think that in writing it I got my thinking on an improved wavelength.

I am like one buried alive, and I want my apartment to become my home again and stop seeming like the crypt in which I am shut up and decaying.