Hi Mama,

Sorry you've gone through 2 disappointments. Being relatively young does work against you. The good news is this: If your attorney didn't feel pretty confident that he could get you approved at the hearing stage, he never would have taken the case. Unless you get approved, he won't make any money. He knows what it takes to get approved, and he figures your medical history will warrant an approval eventually. Otherwise, he wouldn't even bother with you.

It's even possible that your attorney has not given this his very best effort - yet. The longer it takes to get you approved, the bigger the back payment that Social Security will owe you . . . and the bigger his cut will be. A lot of lawyers feel that way, so don't take it as too far amiss for him (or her) to have had that strategy.

It sounds like you may be thinking that the administrative judge at the hearing will be studying your behavior/demeanor to think whether or not you seem employable. The judge is not really going to play amateur-psychiatrist. The judge is going to carefully look at the opinions submitted by the psychiatrists and at how they point to a psychological problem that interferes with you working. Your mood on the particular day of the hearing isn't really relevant.

If SSA sends you to one of their contracted psychiatrists remember this: Your job is not to convince the pdoc that you are bipolar. (Lots of bipolar people have successful careers and work till they're 75 years old.) Your job is to relate clearly how your your emotional problems interferred with you working. Don't give generic information that is characteristic of bipolars as a group. Forget words like "bipolar," "depressed" and "manic." Speak about specific experiences you had . . . like - "I broke down sobbing at work when the supervisor judged my performance negatively." or "I got irritable often and blew up with at some of my co-workers." Not being able to get along effectively with people on the job is one of the biggest reasons that will help you get approved for disability. It's hard to admit unflattering things about yourself. But those are often the very things that really constitute your disability.

People unfairly blame the SSA for making it hard to get approved as having a psychiatric disabilty. The real problem, IMHO, is that applicants want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to believe, "I'm a lovely, responsible, decent person who tries hard and lives up to high standards and tends to be very fair toward everyone around me." AND "I can't hold a job." The brutal truth is that both those things are unlikely to be simultaneously 100% true.

I got approved in three months. I had to get real because I was facing homelessness, if I didn't get approved quickly. So I wrote down on that 13 page thing you fill out some gritty descriptions of how I interacted with others on some jobs and it was pretty clear why I was having trouble holding a job. I related how badly I broke down in front of other people when work conditions were stressful. I decided not to feel humiliated about the truth of who I am and how badly I've coped with the demands of being employed. I coped as best I knew how, but I clearly had inadequate coping patterns, which, at my age, were unlikely to change through getting some more therapy. That honesty got me approved in record-breaking time, even though doctors weren't even sure how to diagnose me. Plus, I had a 30 year paper trail of diligently seeking help through medication and therapy.

Good luck with the hearing. Let us know how it goes. I said, in a post above, that I was not that happy in my current status. It turned out that when I wrote that, back in April, I was actually quite sick with a serious physical problem that neither I, nor my doctors knew about. That's being successfully treated, and I feel pretty well now. (Not lethargic and now sleeping well.)