Legal Inquiry: Atheists and Affirmations (Not Oaths)

[mordant]

Just don't get caught on camera doing cartwheels down the street and you should win easily enough..

It's a bit more difficult than that. They reject the majority of applications on the first go-round; most SSDI recipients have had to lawyer up and appeal a denial.

Of course, you wouldn't know that, given you're not here. But keep on opining, I'm sure someone finds it worthwhile.

I can confirm that. It's almost a first principle of applying for disability. To my knowledge no one has ever had an initial application approved. Many government agencies operate that way; my town zoning board is another example WRT variance applications. Keeps the workload down and filters out non-serious / frivolous applicants.

Of course getting approved can vary greatly in difficulty, it's easier to get approved for something visible like a missing or withered limb than for one of the "invisible illnesses". Once approved, the number of review hoops you must jump through, and how often, also varies by ailment, often for seemingly capricious reasons.

I know all this because my prior wife dealt with SSDI for thirty years up until her death, and one of the things they seemed obsessed with checking for every couple of years was to make sure she wasn't depressed, the subtext being that if she was "just depressed" they could get her off the dole. One doctor said, OF COURSE she's depressed (reactive depression, not clinical). I'd be depressed if I were her, too. I would be worried about her sanity if she WASN'T depressed. Once that observation was on her record, they quit asking about it ;-)