Bipolar Me

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Once I applied for disability for my bipolar disorder and I was turned down Then I took the process as far as I could with a lawyer and he eventually advised me to give it up too. Here’s my story.

I had gotten to the end of my proverbial rope and we had gotten to the end of our money. For over a year I had been sidelined by unremitting depression. There was nothing I could do and nothing my psychiatrist prescribed or my therapist said had helped. We had been living on my husband’s salary and what was in my 401K from when I had last been able to work.

At last my husband pointed out that we couldn’t hold out much longer. He encouraged me to apply for disability. I knew that there would be lots of hoops to jump through and that there was no guarantee of succeeding. But Dan was willing to go with me to the Federal Building and help me get through it. I certainly wasn’t capable of managing it on my own.

Between the two of us, we had looked up what sorts of documents I would need and had acquired them. I was glad we were able to do this because going back again and again for missing documents would have been a horror. I had my appointment with the intake person and went back home to wait.

There were more forms to come. My psychiatrist had to fill out a long one, of course, or write a letter, I don’t remember which. I had to pay him for his time and trouble in doing that but at that point it was just another step that needed taking.

The big step was the psychological interview where I had to perform my little song and dance and convince someone that I was truly disabled. Fortunately, the appointment was not downtown in the Federal Building but in a relatively nearby office building that I knew how to find. Then the hoop-jumping and tap dancing really began.

They tested my memory. They told convoluted stories and asked me questions about them such as the order in which things happened and why the characters did what they did. They were confusing.

They tested my spatial perception. They had me put together those cubes with triangles on them to match patterns they showed me. I still don’t know what that had to do with bipolar disorder.

Then came factual knowledge. I was good at that one. I admit I guessed when they asked me how big around the equator was. I knew the easy stuff like who wrote Tom Sawyer and such.

By the time they got to the word association test, I was very tired. First they gave a pair of words and asked what they had in common, easy ones like truck and train. Later they gave difficult pairs of words that seemed to have nothing in common, like acceptance and denial, but I was supposed to come up with a commonality anyway.

Finally, an interview. I remember the woman asking me if I knew what the saying, “What goes around, comes around” meant. I replied, “As you sow, so shall you reap” and she looked at me funny.

A seemingly endless time later my claim was denied and I got a lawyer to pursue it. By that time so much time had passed that I was coming out of the depression and was able to work a few hours a week. How much did I get paid per hour? he asked. “Thirty dollars,” I said, explaining that I could only work a very limited number of hours. It didn’t matter. As soon as I said thirty dollars the judge’s head would explode, evidently. Lawyer Joe recommended I drop the claim and I did. At least I was getting some work and some income even without disability.

It seemed that for me to get disability I would have had to be together enough not to need it, but sufficiently disabled that I would. Catch-22, as Joseph Heller said.