What diagnosis do you apply for disability with?

I'm applying for disability for the first time now and since I have never been diagnosed with CFS or something similar, I apply with the diagnose my psychiatrist gave me which is borderline personality disorder. They gave me 50-70% disability but for 1 year only, I need to apply every year.

 

I live in the South East of England & apply with the diagnosis of ME/CFS as that's what is on my medical records. I mention other co morbidities that affect my ME on the forms but the condition that prevents me working or .living a normal life is ME.

I would tend to go with whatever is on your medical records and that you have supporting evidence for. If that's something other than ME I would go with that.

I would mention any other condition that makes the "primary" cause of being off work worse or more difficult to manage and also how the "primary" condition might affect co morbidities.

In the UK the forms & benefits process is supposed to focus on how your condition affects you rather than what the diagnosis is. Employment Support questions include being able to use the keypad on a phone, move from sitting to standing and so on, reliably, repeatedly, safely and in a timely manner. So you tick a box and then explain how your health problems affect your ability to do this.

 

Here in the UK I am not eligible to apply for unemployment related benefits what are means tested, but do receive PIP (personal independent payments) aimed at covering the extra costs of living with disability.

My application for PIP was under ME/CFS but in theory it is assessed not on your diagnostic label but your functional ability, what support you need.

 

As far as I know (which is not much):

ME/CFS isn't recognized as disabling illness here in Italy. Some advise pretending that you have some other problem. It's also very difficult to get disability support payments, even for people who are bed bound. I have never bothered to try and obtain legal recognition of being disabled.

I also had a bad experience with a psychiatrist who offered to get me on a disability on the condition that I became a regular customer of his practice. This came across as corrupt and I did not want anything to do with this (someone who needs to reward patients to come to their practice is probably incompetent).

 

I went with a bunch of diagnoses, most of them provable, and they picked the one they were most happy with.

 

When I was on disability years ago it was with a CFS diagnosis.

 

In the UK, they say benefits are based on 'functional assessments' but then if you don't have a formal medical diagnosis they will assume you are making your symptoms up. That's another reason these new NICE ME/CFS guidelines need publishing asap.

 

In Australia, the measure of impairment isn't based on the diagnosis anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

 

Try getting NDIS with a CFS diagnosis. Its very, very hard to do though some have. With only a CFS diagnosis I would have been rejected, completely, for even the disability pension. This was in the 90s though. However the NDIS problem occured for me just a year or two ago, though I did not expect to get it there was a requirement for other services that you had an NDIS decision. (NDIS = National Disability Insurance Scheme) The rules do not seem to apply if the diagnosis is CFS. I do know our local advocacy has been working on this though, and I am unsure of the current outcome.

 

If you are severe enough that you can't reliably mobilise with the aid of a manual wheelchair 50 metres then this would put you in the Limited Capacity for Work Related Activity (LCWRA) group for the working age out of work disability benefit. This is probably the only criteria where ME/CFS would score high enough to get you in this group (the only group in which you won't be required to engage regularly with the Job Centre). There is also another way, which is for the assessor to agree that not putting you in the LCWRA group would have a severe effect on you (or people you are around). Probably around 50% of claimants get into the LCWRA from the latter caveat, as it's very hard to get into the LCWRA based on meeting the 15 points required for a single descriptor, even with quite severe mental health difficulties/development conditions, including autism.

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/...-work-related-activity-assessment-descriptors

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/wca-limited-capability-work-assessment-descriptors

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/wca-limited-capability-work-related-activity-assessment

 

That's how it's supposed to work in the UK, and for some fortunate people, it does. In theory, it's a sound idea: the impact of the same condition, impairment, or injury can differ vastly between individuals depending the their age, co-morbidities, profession, and social circumstances.

In practice, it's not so straightforward, especially if a claimant has a condition that's hard to evidence. Also, the government continues to be taken by surprise by the sheer number of people who are disabled and qualify for support; they react by employing all sorts of dubious tactics and trying to make it more difficult to qualify, and then smart lawyers take them to court and quite often succeed in getting a ruling in claimants' favour. It's a war of attrition that shows no sign of coming to an end.

We don't have such a thing as a state disability pension that allows you to retire permanently on grounds of ill health or disability. Some people here do have good private pension schemes that may allow early retirement on these grounds, but it's a minority – most never have a job with that kind of provision.

 

I'd completely forgotten how bizarre the criteria are!

My claim was indeed based on mobilising. I use a powered wheelchair, so they've never even bothered to call me for assessment.

But my inability to concentrate for long is far more of a barrier to work than needing bloody wheelchair access. As are the constant errors, the length of time it takes me to construct a couple of coherent sentences, and the fact that I can't predict when I might be able to do some work or how long I could keep going.

It's not much use being able to press a button on a keypad with the best of 'em, if your cognition is so poor that you'll completely forget the telephone even exists as soon as your attention switches to something else.

 

i once spent three days phoning the wrong c a b number and being confused by the recorded voice that gives you some choices . my mother finally pointed this out on the third day . by the dwps criteria using the number pad would give no points it is totally not fit for purpose.

 

It's worrying because the recent Green Paper is saying that some of the criteria are now irrelevant due to advances in assistive technology, implying they want to tighten the criteria even further (there's no acknowledgment that the criteria are too restrictive of course).

 

The Green Paper states that when they brought in the WCA they predicted that only 300,000 working age claimants would meet the LCWRA criteria for Income Related ESA/Universal Credit (not the ESA you claim if you have enough recent NI contributions), whereas it's now over 1.5 million (I think from memory, would need to check the figure). This is why they are going to be targeting the Income Related LCWRA group to try to reduce the amount of money spent on this group of claimants in coming years.

 

I should have clarified, I was speaking about the DSP.

The NDIS is it's own disaster, you are right, the diagnosis does matter there because they have an arbitrary list of valid conditions.

 

No, I don't know any.

 

One thing I found invaluable when applying were the guides written by both the MEA and AfME

The UK ESA paperwork has tixk boxes and then really quite small boxes where you can add further details about why you ticked the box you did. It would be very easy to just go through the form if you didn't understand what was behind each question not ticking the boxes that give an accurate picture. Additional information can make all the difference too.

I wonder if there is an ME group in Bulgaria who produce a guide to Bulgarian benefits forms?

If not perhaps another patient group might have one that gives a better idea of what each question really means so you can add the relevant detail? Maybe an MS group?

In the UK we also have Citizen's Advice Bureaus who are council sponsored and can give advice on benefits and legal matters. Is there anything like that in Bulgaria?