Some Arlington family members who got a free ride from
the government for years by faking mental disabilities have admitted to
committing an extensive ruse.
Doreen Mitchell, 54, and her cousin,
John Mitchell, 60, as well as her two sons, Michael Mitchell, 31, and
Sonny Mitchell, 28, have agreed to plead guilty to the scheme in federal
court in Dallas, court records show.
The family members helped one another fake mental disabilities for years
to collect more than $460,000 in benefits from the government,
prosecutors said. They were arrested in 2015 after suspicious agents
secretly followed them to expose their well-rehearsed hoax against the Social Security Administration.
The agents found them dressed normally and engaging in routine daily
activities such as driving, shopping and socializing in large groups,
court records said.
But all four “misrepresented their actual
levels of intelligence and functioning” during interviews and
examinations with Social Security employees, authorities said, including
claims that some of them talked with ghosts. ...
Doreen Mitchell first applied for disability benefits in 1979 when
she was 15 years old, “alleging visual and auditory hallucinations,”
court records said. She claimed she suffered from schizophrenia and
other conditions.
She once attended an SSA exam wearing a dirty
nightgown and “mumbled unintelligibly to herself,” according to court
records. She told investigators that she could not read or write. ...
Federal investigators suspected Doreen Mitchell was faking mental
illness in 2004, and her benefits were stopped. She appealed that
decision in 2005.
At the hearing, she appeared to talk with her
dead father. But the hearing officer noted that “her auditory
hallucinations ... appeared to be an act,” and her appeal was denied. ...
I don't know anything about the evidence here. I do know that it's virtually impossible to get a Social Security disability claim approved on psychiatric grounds for someone who isn't in psychiatric treatment at least off and on. I say off and on because some of the most severely impaired individuals can't manage to stay in regular treatment. That's one of the signs of how severe their impairment is. However those folks also tend to end up in psychiatric hospitals on involuntary commitments. Faking impairment for one consultative examination is one thing. Faking it for visit after visit to a mental health provider is another. Getting yourself hospitalized for phony psychiatric problems is nearly inconceivable. It's hard to imagine many people trying to do any of this much less successfully pulling it off.
I wonder if there was gilding of the lily going on here -- people who had genuinely severe mental impairments who added an overlay of phoniness on top of real mental illness. That seems more likely to me than completely
factitious disorders.
The key thing is that you don't get on Social Security disability merely by showing up for one consultative examination and acting like you think a crazy person would act. If you're not involved with the program, you may think it's that easy but it's not.
