I hope you change your tone. You are down, but your being down is against your best interest. I did not chastise you and it is unfortunate that you perceived it this way. Now is not thr time to join you in your feeling down because doing so will only prolong your misery. It is your life and financial suffering, not mine, and I hope that you can one day appreciate that someone took enough care (and time from their day) to sound an alarm that your attitude, which might well itself be a symptom of your underlying illness, is causing you to sabotage your own wellbeing and ability to thrive. Immediately after posting, I send you a long pm with a lawyer recommendation. While I did not expect any unusual gestures of appreciation for it, I equally did not expect your tirade above. People on here have expressed sympathy for you but I went further and reminded you that you still have a chance to right your situation but you must act properly which requires changing the strategy which has proven unsuccessful. Isn't it a good example of the definition on insanity, acting in the same way but expecting different results?

You idea that you are not more or less disabled with a lawyer and hence should not get one, if extended to other areas of law, would mean that:

- a wrongfully terminated middle aged man who suspects age discrimination as the reason for his termination should not engage a competent labor lawyer in pursuing his claim against his former employer because he has not been discriminated more or less for the fact that he now has a lawyer

- a single mother struggling to feed and clothe her toddler should not engage a seasoned family lawyer who is willing to offer her a sliding scale in pursuing proof of paternity and child support claim against her wealthy ex boyfriend because that man is not more or less the father of her child for the fact that she is represented. No, she should get up at 4 in the morning to stand in line yo be seen at the free clinic for in pro per litigants offered by her local courthouse.

- a couple ruined by medical debts that have been caused by a major illness while being underinsired should not engage a bankruptcy attorney to help them file for Chapter 7 protection because their having a lawyer does not make them more or less deserving of a fresh start in life,

And so on and so forth.

As I hope you see, this is not even about feelings - no, you are on faulty ground in terms of your basic reasoning. SSDI law is full of technical knowledge that is very hard for an in pro per claimant to obtain. It is not a show of weakness yo engage a lawyer. Moreover, given what probably is a sheer volume of your medical records, what with (I am making an assumption here) multiple inpatient stays, multiple prescribers, possibly multiple attempts to work that turned out to be false starts, just managing getting records properly from each source and presenting these records probably is a daunting task... way too daunting for a truly mentally disabled individual.

I thought more about your situation after PMing you yesterday and tried yo place myself in the shoes of your ALJ who sees this self represented claimant in front of her who persists in being self represented, failure after failure, even though it is common knowledge that getting a lawyer involves zero out ofnpocket outlays up front. And yet this person claims to be medically disabled to the point of being able to hold ANY job (that is thr standard for SSDI, unlike for private disability coverage where the standard has to do initially with the ability to hold a job similar to the one the claimant has before). So he claims to be completely disabled and yet he manages his whole case alone, doing research, making filings etc.? That would make sense to me as a judge if the disability claimed were purely somatic and di not involve emotions, cognition, motivation, executive functioning, social adaptation and the like. But somewhere there you claim severe deficits in some of the above listed areas which is inconsistent with the ability to represent self. I would be indredulous as a judge.

Plus, there is overall a strong bias against self represented people among the judiciary. It very well might be unfortunate but it is a fact to contend with.

So I thought of further telling you that you are harming your case by appearing in pro per before the ALJ because the judge sees you as a high functioning individual whose very behavior in court does not support his own claim of disability.

If you search this forum and the forum on insurance and finances, you will see that people on here who actually got approved for disability mostly found the preparation of their case overwhelming and hired lawyers to help them. If they found it overwhelming, why do you have such high standards for yourself that you must be a lone wolf, a hero who fights for his rights without enlisting any support? Isn't this attitude illogical and an example of self sabotage? I would go even further and wonder if this is sort of extremely passive "checking out of life", a symptom of severe depression. So I thought I would give you this feedback.

Contrary to the claim in your tirade, I did not show disdain or invalidation of your feelings. I expressly stated that you can continue feeling these feelings no problem, they are just a faulty ground for decision making, if you want to reach your goal.

Then again, maybe you do not depend on SSDI income and your methods suit you because you have fallback sources of income, that I do not know. I was writing to you assuming that you are in dire straits and that you have an irrational and possibly illness-relates attitude that sabotages your plans and harms you in the long term and that can be corrected without any "stop feeling your feelings" admonitions. Feelings are what they are, we very often cannot change them and stop feeling them, but we do not have to base behavior and strategy on them. Otherwise, taken to its logical extreme, your expectation of what your fellow mental health support forum should do would extend to joining a suicidal person in their suicidal feelings, commiserating with them but never telling them yo go to psych ER right away to avoid irreparable harm.

You wrote that everyone told you to get a lawyer. Did that everyone, too, become an object of your angry speech? Did you not see that they were trying to help you?
...

I knew a software engineer who died alone of drug overdose even though everything was going well for him and he was an independently wealthy early retiree thanks to early stock options in a company that made headlines. He could live wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, etc. I was shocked and puzzled by his death. Some years after it I had lunch with his former girlfriend who had remained his friend after their romantic breakup. She explained to me that this (relatively young) man had friends in Ireland, a libertarian couple, who had a great influence on him and who made it impossible for other friends, those sounding an alarm about his illicit drug use, to try to intervene. Their philosophy was that as a competent individual, he had the right to do whatever he wanted with his life, even though that behavior would ultimately kill him. They did not endorse any interventions, any help, any addiction treatment, anything. When he died of an accidental overdose, his ex girlfriend and local friends gathered in celebration of his short life and shared how helpless they felt because he would not accept any offers of support. The couple in Ireland felt content that their friend got to live the life the way he wanted, using the drugs that he wanted, without interference from others in his individual choices.

So, I am not like them and I tried to intervene by showing you that you are acting irrationally and against your best interest and that you can still change your strategy without changing your feelings to which you are, of course, entitled.

If this still falls on deaf ears, you are welcome to put me on your ignore list.