What we’ve said about Disability claims

“to handle wrangle with disability, you can do quite a lot of the same stuff you always do, but you're just going to be a bit more specific with certain questions and thinking”

“So ask yourself, under what rule set am I determining the presence or absence or degree of disability? That's sort of question one when it comes to the disability claim”

“Yeah, simply follow the rules. So number one, know the rules. Number two, follow the rules. Number three, do a medical assessment”

“Diagnosis and assessment for identifiable psychiatric conditions and level of functioning. And document it. That's all you really need to be doing. What is the diagnosis? What are the impairments are the main questions”

“You need a rational connection between the two. You need to explain properly why one is connected to the other”

“do I have enough medical evidence to say that they are impaired to X degree and that this impairment requires time off in order to bring them back to health? That's basically the question”

“Don't believe or feel or act like you have to be a forensic evaluator. You're still a medical evaluator here. You're just doing your regular job”

“I think we need to start with a good faith effort to determine whether a medical intervention is necessary. And, you know, sometimes it is”

“my first question is, what kind of disability would you like help with? Do you have any paperwork ready for this disability type? Do you have an attorney for this disability type”

“the Family Medical Leave Act. That's a U.S. federal law that gives up to 12 weeks of unpaid job protected leave. So essentially, the person is not getting paid, but their job is protected at the end of it”

“it has to be a serious enough condition medically that you can't do work, school, regular daily activities or that you're so occupied with the treatment that you can't do work, school, regular daily activities”

“short-term disability has, is typically for three to six months. Uh, and long-term disability is when you kind of get greater than that. Um, eligibility is when there is similar. It depends on the policy”

“There's also short-term disability claims that generally are embedded in state law. That's basically unemployment. It's different than unemployment insurance. It's disability insurance”

“So the disability rules under SSI and SSDI are the same, actually. What's different is that for you to receive SSDI, you have to have accumulated Social Security credits”

“what they're really focusing on is whether a person can sustain full-time work with normal attendance pace interpersonal functioning”

“So there's four areas. The first is understand, remember, or apply information. The second is interact with others. The third is concentrate, persist, or maintain pace. And the fourth is adapt or manage oneself”

“It still breaks down areas of work functioning that can be useful. for you to read, to familiarize yourself with different levels of impairment and different types of impairment that can happen from medical conditions”

“the psychiatric condition must be diagnosable and directly linked to a workplace exposure. So ordinary stress is not considered possible. it's not considered here. The stress must exceed a normal amount of job pressure”

“one thing that can help with this functionality assessment is the rating scale HUDAS, the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule, which addresses a lot of these things that we're talking about”

“Despite the DSM explicitly telling legalists not to use it as a manual or Bible, the law basically treats the DSM as the Bible. of psychiatric conditions”

“personality is always active clinically, but it's also not sufficient to explain someone who is presenting more acutely. OK, it's basically rarely sufficient to explain that”

“Yes. In theory, you can just have a personality disorder and get SSI. So it is a medical condition”

“I don't think it's a good idea for people who are not experienced with malingering assessment, formal malingering assessment to call malingering”

“So part of disability isn't just signing the paperwork or not signing the paperwork. It's developing a treatment plan”

“You see an exacerbation or new onset of a mental disorder. What's the treatment plan? It can't be the same thing that you're doing before. That's not good medicine”

“How are we going to use the time that we're going to have you off at work to get you better, to make sure that this kind of problem doesn't happen again for you”

“for all the other types of disability, we give disability mostly because we anticipate that at some point there will be recovery and that recovery might happen on its own. It might happen with assistance or it might happen with ongoing treatment”

“Don't grant forever disability unless you think that someone is truly going to be permanently disabled”

“So giving long-term disability will be, and can and will impact long-term employability, you have to really ask yourself, is this someone who is going to benefit”

“work actually provides a structure that's very protective for a lot of conditions. So when you're doing these disability assessments, you need to be talking to the person about the downsides of disability”

“When we give disability paperwork, you should also advise the patient in the same way that you do with medications about the risks to the benefits”

“Human beings fundamentally do not like to do nothing. They like to create things. They like to connect with each other and they like to generate”

“Don't write anything that you would not testify to under oath. OK, think about that”

“You can't sign every single paperwork for everyone who asked for it. And you can't deny every single person who asked for it on some vague principles”

“I see a lot of patients be put on disability with like, you know, a therapist or a psychiatrist will put them on and then not have any sort of additional treatment that they're providing”

“My thoughts or my politics or considerations of whether or not someone should have time off or whether or not... uh someone should be getting paid while they're not working or whether or not they're i dislike them because of their personality disorder simply should that should not be any sort of that should not be involved whatsoever”

“These are forms that are generated by the attorney for you to basically do free expert work. I don't fill out those forms unless I think there's a very clear case and that the patient needs to get disability payments fast”

“They either ignore it entirely and say, listen, this isn't your job. Send it to a forensic evaluator, which is not appropriate, by the way. You can hardly get a forensic evaluator for forensic cases”