I remember when I was 19, freshly diagnosed and living in my first group home. I had no job or car or anything else for that matter and the counselors sent me downtown to Social Security to apply for benefits.
I mean just a month before that I was just a 19 year old kid living with his parents, watching TV most of the day and occasionally going jogging in the hills. And then came my first psyche ward and from there, directly to this group home.
And I could barely apply for a bus pass or library card but here I was on the fourth floor of this huge office building I had never been to before, by myself, with my paranoid schizophrenia, filling out a 5 page form. When the form asked, “What’s the nature of your disability and why are you applying?” I didn’t want to look bad and write “schizophrenia” so I wrote, “Emotional problems.”
Lol, well big news: Social Security doesn’t give someone $800 a month for “emotional problems”. I got denied of course and my parents called up social security and asked them why I got denied. They told them what I had wrote and my parents were a little bugged at me for messing up the application but they felt sorry for me and a year later they hired a lawyer who went to our church and by this time I was in the hospital and our lawyer/friend
got all the forms and my medical records and a bunch of other forms and info for an appeal and actually came into the hospital to see me and had me answer some questions and sign a bunch of papers.
He told me what I used to hear all the time. He told me I didn’t look or sound like I was mentally ill and if he didn’t know it already he never would have guessed. But yeah, I guess I’m just saying to not worry about looking bad when you’re applying for benefits. Go ahead and tell your lawyer or the judge the gritty details of what actually living with schizophrenia is truly like. Don’t sugar coat it. Don’t tell every weird delusion or say a bunch of crazy stuff but just be honest about how much it screws up your life.