Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

Okay, this has nothing to do with anything, but it's pissing me off right now so I figured I'd vent.

In the U.S., when you apply for disability benefits and keep getting denied, you can request that a special judge - called an Administrative Law Judge - hear your case and decide whether you're disabled. If that doesn't work, you can ask a special council to reconsider the judge's decision. If that doesn't work, then you can sue in federal court.

I'm an extern at a federal court and I work on these types of cases. One thing I see frequently when doing research is plaintiffs who claim disability based on mental illnesses. That's fine - a mental illness can be enough to render you disabled. The problem is that judges often don't know how mental illnesses work.

One thing that annoys me is when judges have no understanding of the concept of good and bad days. For instance, I've seen judges scour multiple years' worth of treatment records, find the one time that the plaintiff did not have a breakdown, and decide, based on that one good day, that the plaintiff's mental illness must not be that bad. Then the judge denies the plaintiff benefits based on that. At least I'm in a position where I can reverse a decision like that, but it never should've happened in the first place.

I just needed to get that out of my system. Maybe someday I'll expand on this, because there's so much more that judges don't understand about mental illnesses, and these misunderstandings often leave legitimately disabled people without benefits.