The "Right Mental Attitude"

     Someone retweeted this to me: "Nothing can stop the man w/ the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man w/the wrong mental attitude,"

     This was tweeted by a man who was a college football player and who is now the sales manager of a large corporation. It sorta fits his background, wouldn't you say?

     There is every reason to encourage people to have "the right mental attitude." That can help take one far. However, taken literally, and many people take this sort of platitude literally, it means that if you've succeeded in life, it must be because you have "the right mental attitude" and if you've been unable to overcome adversity, it must mean that you have "the wrong mental attitude."

     I'm cruel to say this but if the person who wrote this comes down with cancer, his "right mental attitude" may not enable him to achieve any goal he may have. If medical treatment doesn't work, he's going to suffer and die. Whether medical treatment works has almost nothing to do with his "mental attitude." Whatever goals he may have had will not be achieved. If his son or daughter develops schizophrenia, having "right mental attitude" won't get them very far. They'll probably be unable to work on a regular basis, regardless of their mental attitude. Life circumstances can completely overwhelm any "mental attitude" no matter how "right" it may be.

     I deal with clients every day who feel that their disability isn't so much caused by their illnesses as by their personal shortcomings. They feel that being out of work means that they have failed even though objectively they haven't failed; they're simply dealing with serious illness. It's bad enough to be sick. It's worse to mistakenly think that your inability to work means is your fault when it isn't.

     As a society, we're eager to tout the successes of those who have overcome disability with the "right mental attitude" while ignoring the fact that the disability overcome seldom involves factors such as chronic severe pain or chronic progressive illness or chronic severe mental illness. We like nice stories about people in wheelchairs who are still working. We think that's how we'll be if illness strikes us. We'll have the "right mental attitude" and be able to overcome our disability. When we hear stories about people with bipolar disorder who end up homeless, we want to think that can't happen to us because, unlike the homeless people, we have the "right mental attitude." We don't want to consider the possibility that the difference between the person in the wheelchair who is still working and the homeless person with bipolar disorder is the nature and severity of the disability rather than "mental attitude." We think we can control our "mental attitude." We don't like to think about the fact that we can't control illness and injury.

     Writ large, this is the problem with this country's attitudes towards disability. We think that people can control disability with the "right mental attitude" but that's a delusion that leads us to be cruel to disabled people and even to ourselves when we become disabled.

Memorial Day 2015

Recruiting Workers For Social Security During World War II

Number Drawing Disability Goes Up In April

     The number of people drawing Disability Insurance Benefits from Social Security went up by about 4,000 in April. This was the first increase after six straight months of decline.

Most Popular Baby Names By State

     You can now search for the most popular baby names for 2014 (and other years) by state.

Why Appellate Decisions Matter

     Judge Voorhees of the Western District of North Carolina issued the following order today in 37 Social Security cases pending before him: 

THIS MATTER is before the Court sua sponte in light of Mascio v. Colvin, 780 F.3d 632 (4th Cir. 2015). The parties are hereby directed to consult one another and discuss, in good faith, whether the ruling in Mascio requires sentence four remand pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 405(g) for rehearing or other administrative proceedings. The parties shall then advise the Court via Status Report to be filed with the Court on or before June 8, 2015 on this issue, namely, whether remand to the Commissioner of Social Security is appropriate. The Status Report must certify that counsel have, in fact, discussed Mascio and its implications in the specific case. If a consent to remand is not proposed and supplemental briefing is requested by either party, all supplemental filings should be submitted on or before June 15, 2015.

Charlotte's Story: A Video Posted By Social Security

The Faces and Facts of Disability: Charlotte's Story
When Charlotte suffered two strokes in 2007, she was no longer able to work and quickly found herself facing #homelessness. Thankfully, she had earned #SocialSecurity insurance coverage by contributing into the program throughout her working life. Without Social Security payments to replace a portion of her lost income, Charlotte is sure she would be homeless today.Visit http://ow.ly/MqCSK to learn more about the faces and facts of Social Security #disability.
Posted by Social Security Administration on Thursday, May 7, 2015

New Cancer Listings

     The Social Security Administration has revised its Listings used in adjudicating disability caused by cancer. The new Listings are effective on July 20.

US-India Social Security Agreement Negotiations Resume

     After a gap of five years, the United States and India have resumed negotiations on a Social Security agreement. The United States has Social Security agreements with 25 nations. These typically seek to avoid double taxation of income for transnational employees and to provide for cooperation between Social Security agencies. You can actually file a claim for German social security benefits through a Social Security field office in the United States, for instance. 

     India's Social Security system covers only a small percentage of the country's population and isn't remotely comparable to those of the nations with whom the United States has a Social Security agreement. However, India's economy is booming and there are large numbers of Indian nationals working in the United States and a fair number of American nationals working in India.

     These negotiations may seem unimportant to Americans but they seem quite important to some Indians. Whenever I've posted anything about negotiations on a Social Security agreement with India, this blog has received a ton of hits from India.

Report On Field Office Closures

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) had released a study on field office closures. This was in response to a Senate Special Committee on Aging investigation. The OIG study showes that Social Security's documentation of the office closures included the "primary factors" required by agency policy but not all the information required by agency policy. Social Security plans to update its office closure process.

     This isn't going to satisfy members of Congress who have office closures in their district. Their problem isn't Social Security's process or its documentation. It's the fact that an office is being closed in their district.

     Anyway, below is a table showing a list of Social Security field offices "consolidated", meaning closed, in fiscal year 2014. Why were no offices closed in the Midwest or Mountain states?