Social Security Disability: How to Prove your Anxiety Disorder Prevents you from Working

Social Security Disability: How to Prove Your Anxiety Disorder Prevents you From Working

By: John M. FitzGerald

As a practical matter, every applicant for disability benefits must either meet the listings or prove inability to work in any significant capacity.

The listings are just what they sound like. Inability equates to disability. So the issue is not whether anyone would hire you, or whether there are factories where you live, but whether a hypothetical person with your limitations can do any type of work that exists in significant numbers in the national economy.

As with exertional impairments, proving disability on the basis of a psychological disorder requires documentation of a severe medically determinable impairment, and an assessment of the degree to which said impairment limits ability to perform work related activity for a period of at least twelve months.

To prevent a person from working, any impairment must be "severe," and psychological impairments are no different.

As with all impairments, the first question is: are you working now? Because if you are working, the likelihood is you are not disabled. If you are not working, the question becomes whether your impairment is severe. If your impairment is not severe, you are not disabled.

To determine whether a mental impairment is severe, SSA looks at 4 criteria: (a) activities of daily living; (b) maintaining social functioning; (c) concentration, persistence and pace; and (d) episodes of decompensation.

With regard to the first three criteria, a person can either have no limitation, moderate limitation, a marked limitation, or an extreme limitation. Any two of the criteria must fall into the "marked" range for an impairment to be considered "severe." If the impairment is severe, the analysis proceeds to step 3, the listings. If it is not severe, the degree of limitation must still be considered in assessing a claimant's residual functional capacity (RFC).

The fourth criteria--episodes of decompensation--is a medical term describing an exacerbation of a claimant's symptoms to the point where further medical intervention is required. If, for example, medications fail to keep a mental condition reasonably well controlled to the point where a patient must be hospitalized or further medicated, then one can say that the patient has lost some measure of composure. Obviously, the more this occurs, the more it interferes with ability to work.

Step 3, the listings, is a claimant's earliest opportunity to win. There are 14 bodily systems represented in the listings, with mental impairments enumerated in section 12.

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