The newsletter of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR), which is not available online, reports that the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a division of the National Academies of Sciences, is working on three "consensus reports" for Social Security which may be coming out later this year. These will deal with:
- Psychological testing, including symptom validity testing;
- Mental impairments in children, especially autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; and
- Speech and language disorders in children.
Whatever else it may be, the IOM in this instance is basically a beltway bandit, receiving large sums of money for reports that are always so tentative and hedged that they're useless. I wonder what they'll tell Social Security about symptom validity testing. Social Security has been resistant to using it because of questions about its validity. My understanding is that this sort of testing would only apply to claimants with brain damage or intellectual deficiency. Since the agency is approving so few with either of these problems, I doubt that using symptom validity testing would matter much anyway.
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