How To Successfully Win A SSDI Claim If You Are Living With Schizophrenia
If you are living with schizophrenia and have found you are unable to hold down a steady job due to your mental illness, then you can apply for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). To file an SSDI claim, you need to fill out the required application and submit it to the Social Security Administration (SSA) for approval. While this may seem like a simple process, the SSA has a reputation of denying applications for small errors on paperwork and all sorts of other strange reasons.
To ensure your claim for disability is approved, you must do each of these important things:
Seek Out and Comply with Mental Health Treatment
One of the most important things you can do to increase your chances of an approval for your SSDI claim is to seek out medical help for your schizophrenia. You should be seeing a psychiatrist regularly and sharing with them information about how your mental illness is affecting your daily life. This is very important because your doctor's notes are a written record of the progression of your illness and your disability. Since there are no laboratory tests one can do to prove their schizophrenia has worsened, your doctor's records are vital.
Since the negative symptoms of schizophrenia are greatly improved in patients who comply with their regimen of medications, it is vital you take any medications your doctor prescribes. If you refuse to take medication that helps your condition, then the SSA will deny your SSDI claim because you aren't doing everything you can to help your condition improve so you are able to work.
Request Copies of Your Medical Records
Before you attempt to fill out your SSDI claim application, first request copies of your medical records from your psychiatrist and other medical providers. This step is very important because the SSDI application will ask you for detailed information about all of your past medical history. The copies of your medical records will give you all of the pertinent dates and treatment notes you need to accurately fill out the SSA's paperwork.
Consider Hiring an Attorney
In conclusion, since the SSA is known for often denying SSDI claims for small paperwork errors or other such nonsense, you should consider hiring an attorney to file your disability claim. An SSDI lawyer has experience dealing with the bureaucracy of the SSA as it relates to patients with schizophrenia and can help get your claim approved on the first application.
Contact professionals like Horn & Kelley, PC Attorneys at Law to learn more.