What is a Disability?

I have a friend.

No, it’s not really me pretending. This is an actual friend who has an actual problem that I want to talk to you about. This friend had some serious health issues a while back -- a rather large stroke when she was very young, leading to epilepsy. Still, she made it through the rest of high school, then college. She was tough. True, she didn’t make it in four years but in seven. She didn’t work two or three jobs to finish in the university, partying all night and going to school and work all day like many students. While I was out clubbing and drinking, she was sleeping the required hours, abstaining alcohol and coffee rather than risking seizures. While I was dating “X” amount of men, jabbering and babbling to the new toy-boy of the week, she was quiet with her one quiet beau, taking time to speak because of her aphasia.

When she finally got out, ready to start life in her mid twenties, she had a problem. Because of her epilepsy, she had to take medication that knocked her out and made her spacey. Because of her seizures, she couldn’t function on a regular basis all the time. Because of her aphasia, she couldn’t talk very well. Because of her stroke, she could only use her stupid left hand. Thus she couldn’t hold down a nine-to-five job very well. She had a very competent college degree with nothing to use it on.

Sad, you say. But a lot in life is sad. And in America, if you can’t find work because of a disability, you go to “Unemployment” or “SSDI” (Social Security Disability Insurance) or, since she hadn’t worked at all, “SSI” (Supplemental Security Income). Right?

She applied. I helped her apply (her handwriting is atrocious), feeling slightly guilty for my nine to five job which I got almost after getting out of school. She went to the Social Security office and pled her case. Then we waited. And waited. After all, she really wanted to work and this “Ticket to Work” that the current administration put in place was just the thing to give her a boost. Right? And waited. Finally, the letter came in the mail.

Denied.

Why, you say? Because, as far as they can see, she is able to be employed in a “substantial gainful activity”:

"The term substantial gainful activity describes a level of work activity that is both substantial and gainful. Substantial work activity involves performance of significant physical or mental duties, or a combination of both, which are productive in nature.

Gainful activity is work performed for pay or profit; or work of a nature generally performed for pay or profit, whether or not a profit is realized. For activity to be substantial, it need not necessarily be performed on a full–time basis; work activity performed on a part–time basis may also be substantial."1

In other words, since she went to college, studying hard in a very lucrative field, she could now work at McDonalds. As far as SSI was concerned, she was not disabled.

The current administration extols their new plan, stating,

"Too many individuals still find it difficult to pursue an education, or own a home, or hold a job. We must continue to remove the artificial barriers to achievement that remain."2

The ironic reasoning is that if she didn’t go to college, if she didn’t strive to work with the brain that the stroke had left her, then she would have been eligible.
Disability, it seems, comes in two levels: qualified for SSI vs. ineligible. Private companies, in many places, judge the eligibility of each person with whether he or she could get SSI. The JAN (Job Accommodation Network), a service of the Office of Disability Employment Policy U.S. Department of Labor., though not entirely biased, looks hard at the record of SSI before helping in its truest capacity.

And my friend? Now she’s self-employed. It was hard for her. Her parents supported her, not the government. And her job now is nothing like what she studied in school. The “Ticket to Work” didn’t work in her case, but she finally got ahead anyway. Some disabled people make it.

Most don’t…

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Social Security Supplemental Income