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All the people I know who have been able to claim disability for psychiatric reasons as adults have come from upper middle class families (e.g. my bipolar aunt whose brother was the superintendent of buildings for a small cities, a friend who dropped out of grad school after not seeing his advisor for nine months whose father was a specialist manager for failing Montgomery wards stores, an ex-friend who suffered from panic disorder and agoraphobia whose father was an doctor in the army who later rose high in the ranks of the medical establishment.)

Conversely I've seen people from hardscrabble backgrounds who are obviously disabled (a friend with no diagnosis but who so thought disordered that even though she are addicted to cigarettes it would take hours for her to get it together enough to smoke her first cigarette even with help) who would struggle to deal with the paperwork to get food stamps and TAANF, never mind the much more difficult and adversarial process to get SSI or SSDI.



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