Hello Bob: Thank you for bringing your concern here to PC. I see this is your first post. Welcome to Psych Central. One additional forum, here on PC, that may be of interest to you would be the Partners of People & Caregivers forum. Here's a link:

https://psychcentralforums.com/partn...ivers-support/

I'm not a mental health professional. So I can't offer you anything in the way of authoritative advice regarding your brother's situation. It's certainly a difficult set of circumstances with no clear pathway to success... assuming that one even exists.

You mentioned a social worker opining your brother would not qualify for disability (which is, at least to my mind, unethical by the way. A social worker is not qualified to rule on whether or not a client is eligible for disability.) And you mentioned your brother's psychiatrist saying he could write a letter but it would be doing your brother a "big disservice". (Don't you just love it when someone who's probably pulling down several hundred thousand dollars a year has the audacity to tell someone who's as downtrodden as your brother that writing a letter in support of SSDI would be a big disservice?)

Of course I don't know all of the details here. And maybe there's more to this than you could reasonably include in your post. But my thinking here would be to hire an attorney who specializes in Social Security Disability cases & get the ball rolling on submitting an application. It's been a few years now since I was actively involved in this sort of thing. So perhaps things have changed. But when I was actively involved in these sorts of things the rule-of-thumb, so to speak, was that every SSDI applicant is denied on the first go-around, especially if they are unrepresented. However if they hire a knowledgeable SSDI attorney, the odds of being approved increase dramatically.

I don't know if your brother is capable of working or not. And I have no idea whether or not he can, in fact, get SSDI. But the fact is he has a right to apply. And I believe he still has the right to be represented in that process by an attorney who works in the SSDI application field. (Where I live there are TV ads all the time for attorneys who do this type of work.) I do understand the dilemma your parents feel themselves to be in. Years ago I periodically worked with aging parents who had sons or daughters who had developmental disabilities. And they almost always felt the same responsibility toward their adult children your parents feel toward your brother. Qualifying for SSDI isn't going to solve all of your brother's or your parents' problems. However, at least from my personal non-professional perspective, it's a step in the right direction & one that should be taken... despite the apparent hubris of the professionals around him. My best wishes to you, your brother & your parents. I hope you find PC to be of benefit.