Wednesday, January 15, 2020

This Needs To Be Said

I needed to put this into blog form because what i am writing about below, is a very real and frightening thing that our current nightmare in chief is actually proposing. He is basically proposing a new rule that will increase the frequency of Social Security evaluations for those of us who are disabled and already suffering at the hands of a very meager system that barely takes care of us as it is.
I have linked an article below which tells more about this proposed new law….a new law that cannot happen, as it will mean hundreds of thousands of us disabled folks will have NO way to survive…because this will cause many of us to lose our SSI and SSDI benefits.
Just the thought of this makes me sick to my stomach, and every other fight or flight emotional response imaginable.
I have been disabled and unable to work at gainful employment my entire adult life. I am now almost 60 years old, will turn 60 this coming May. On top of my mental disabilities and disability of autism, i now am physically disabled and have end stage kidney failure.
Losing my Social Security Survivor’s benefits will kill me.
The vast majority of disabled people receiving SSI and SSDI are not faking it, as i am not, and already, the re-evaluation process they put us through is more often than not an ordeal that is dehumanizing, cruel, and traumatic.
On top of that, they don’t allow us enough time to fill out the very detailed forms they give you, and eval appointments are made to where you cannot cancel them for ANY reason..not even for dialysis, like i have 3 times a week. And the forms themselves are huge books, literally.

This is like a nightmare come true for me. I have been on SSI, and then SSA for the past several decades, and whenever i have had to go through a re-evaluation, it sends me into an anxiety so high that i get literally sick over it…..and that is not because i have anything to hide, it is exactly because these re-evaluations are downright demeaning and terrifying. They often will send us to a psychiatrist, yes, a psychiatrist, who will yell at us and do all they can to antagonize us with the deliberate intent to cause a meltdown. The first time i saw a Social Security psychiatrist, he upset me so badly i ran out of his office screaming, shaking, and crying so hard i couldn’t hardly breathe. My grandmother and mother had to drive a whole mile to catch up to me, and then, even though he wrote saying i would never be able to work or function in the normal world, i lost my SSI for four months, and i went into a horrible depression where my hair fell out in huge clumps.
Me having to see two such psychiatrists in 1981, then again in 1990, traumatized me to the pint that ever since then, when i am met with a notice of evaluation from SSA, i literally go into a full on panic that i will get another mean psychiatrist, and lose my benefits again because of just this same type of Draconian program the then Reagan administration cooked up to weed out the “supposed fraud” in the system.
I had two more evaluations in 1999 and 2007, but luckily, this time i got a very nice lady to evaluate me, and i had friends go in with me who had my back.
But increasing the frequency of evaluations did not work then. And it will not work now.
When Reagan originally did this, this caused countless disabled people to literally become homeless and die. The same will happen if 45 is allowed to unleash this cruelty.
Thank you, Lydia X. Z. Brown for posting this and for being interviewed in this article.
Now you know why i hate 45.

No comments: