this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Chronic Illness
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A community/support group for chronically ill people. While anyone is welcome, our number one priority is keeping this a safe space for chronically ill people.
This is a support group, not a place for people to spout their opinions on disability.
Rules
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Be excellent to each other
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Absolutely no ableism. This includes harmful stereotypes: lazy/freeloaders etc
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No quackery. Does an up-to date major review in a big journal or a major government guideline come to the conclusion you’re claiming is fact? No? Then don’t claim it’s fact. This applies to potential treatments and disease mechanisms.
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No denialism or minimisation This applies challenges faced by chronically ill people.
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No psychosomatising psychosomatisation is a tool used by insurance companies and governments to blame physical illnesses on mental problems, and thereby saving money by not paying benefits. There is no concrete proof psychosomatic or functional disease exists with the vast majority of historical diagnoses turning out to be biomedical illnesses medicine has not discovered yet. Psychosomatics is rooted in misogyny, and consisted up until very recently of blaming women’s health complaints on “hysteria”.
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“freeloaders” is exceedingly rare, it’s mainly a rightwing talking point to erode support for benefits. A high percentage of people with disability who can’t work aren’t even able to get disability insurance.
it takes years, you need to hire a lawyer, go through extensive medical testing… All that to get a couple thousand a year, and given that you’re not working, it’s barely survivable.
The only report I read on it was 15 years ago, a report by the general inspector of SSDI they estimated that 1-3% of people applying for disability were fraudulent and they had on average a 0.3% success rate. I wonder if that report is available online, I had read it at the local library.
People like this will fight tooth and nail to prevent any theoretical "freeloaders" from getting less than minimum wage to survive on at the expense of something like 98.5% of people who make genuine claims (because your description is accurate, it is absolute torture to go through, and this bullshit lie is pushed to manufacture public support to make it even harder), but they accept tax dodging billionaires exploiting society for their own gain as an inevitable part of life they're happy to put up with because they've been brainwashed in to thinking one day it might be them (when the reality is you're probably thousands of times more likely to become ill and or disabled than you are to become filthy rich).
It's so fucking twisted.
I feel like thousands of times is deeply underestimating the odds. There are 801 billionaires in the US, while there are over 70 million people living with a disability.
Edit: I should add that I agree very much with the rest of your comment.
Yeah, I didn't have the energy to go look up the numbers lol I figured thousands still covered hundreds of thousands, but millions might be overshooting it, but you're absolutely right, thanks.
It’s like saying the problem with the criminal justice system is guilty people being found innocent.
Great parallel. If there is to be error, let it be on the positive side and not hurt those who need help.
Unfortunately the justice system does find a lot of guilt people innocent, especially in cases of sexual violence, and or if they have a lot of money and power, so it might not be the best comparison, but I get what you mean!
The exaggeration or outright lying about welfare and social nets for political gain has roots back to the 60s. Reagan used the already created term "welfare queen" to disable even more help. Far easier to taint the whole thing than to improve fraud detection or shudder let the very small percentage of fraud exist while you try to help as many people as possible.
Republicans hate people. It's as simple as that.
Our respective experiences might differ based on context.
Where I live, there's 500k people on disability, on a work age population of around 5 million (1).
I was offered disability benefits, as I received my diagnosis.
You were offered sick leave or permanent disability benefits? In most places those are completely different.
Someone with CPTSD in my country might get long term sick leave if their condition flares up, but that condition isn’t in the list of those considered for long term disability benefits.
If getting long term disability in belgium is so early that’s probably a good thing. Lot’s of disabled people in other countries literally die on the streets because they don’t have the physical or financial capital it takes to go through the multi year long draining process it takes to get disability benefits.
Permanent, as of the neurological component.
The CPTSD developed by growing up in an environment not, beneficial for lack of better word, to my situation.
That’s really progressive of belgium, you’re lucky to live there.
99% of countries wouldn’t do that.
Yet, there's a freeloather problem here.
By legal definition, there's not. As anyone that receives disability benefits is legally disabled.
But in practice.
and your sources to back that up are…?
I’m sure like everywhere a couple people cheat the system. But using that to excuse the marginalisation of disabled people who can’t work is disingenuous at best.
That's indeed an issue. By definition an elephant is an elephant, even if it has great manes and hunts antilopes in the savanna.
so your claim that there is a freeloading problem is not backed by data?
The situation here is simply reversed.
Where, in your examples, it takes lawyers and years to get benefits.
Can you prove there isn't a freeloader problem, in your situation, as each case takes years of legal resolution?
We can only refer to anecdotal experience, or gross numbers. 1 out of 10 working age people are on disability in Belgium. What's the gross ratio where you live?
About 1 in 12, and I know a couple people who need it but have been refused.
By the way, just so you know I’m leaving your comments up because people have put a lot of effort into making good replies. But if that wasn’t the case, many of them don’t fit within the rules.
It doesn’t sound like you’re bad faith, but this is number one a support group for disabled people, so repeating harmful stereotypes about freeloaders or whatever would generally be removed.
Not that dissimilar. Can you please provide a source?
That would indeed be surprising information for me!
250k people on disability benefits + estimated 270k people on long term sick leave from work = 520k
the proportion of that to our 5.7 million working age population is about 1 in 12
two datasets used for calculation: https://www.bsv.admin.ch/bsv/fr/home/assurances-sociales/iv/statistik.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/fr/home/statistiques/travail-remuneration/activite-professionnelle-temps-travail/heures-travail/absences.html
Thank you. It's indeed not that different. Going from 1 in 12 to 1 in 10 is not as great difference as I assumed.
I need to review my opinion on the magnitude of the freeloather problem.
I assume you might work in the field, given your chosen username?
I used to study social data science. A couple of my projects, including masters thesis were dedicated to disability, but I didn’t specialise in disability specifically.
And then I became heavily disabled myself (by utter unluckiness).
So while I did work in a similar field this is mostly coming from personal experience.
I work a lot in data science too. But yeah, I was born with it, had to live with it, even before diagnosis.
That's my point of view: I can do it despite, given A and B and C ..
You've known a before. I can imagine the difference to be shocking. You have before and after!
Yeah it’s pretty bad. I haven’t been able to leave my bed since I became disabled. My body is basically half dead
I'm thinking paralysis? Am I wrong?
You're feeling angry too, right?
How can I help you?
I just want to chip in that the definition of "disabled" is more complex than just receiving disability benefits. I'm going to use a UK framework to illustrate what I mean, but my overall argument applies equally to other countries.
There are multiple different kinds of disability benefit in the UK. One of them (PIP) isn't dependent on household income, and isn't linked to one's ability to work. ESA is another disability benefit which does depend on income and is also linked to difficulty working. You can get both PIP and ESA, but it's fairly common for people to get PIP, but not ESA. Being in receipt of either of these benefits would potentially qualify a person as being "disabled"
These benefits are also used for gaining access to other resources for disabled people, like a blue parking badge that allows one to park in disabled bays. The easiest way to get one of those is to provide evidence of being in receipt of a benefit such as PIP, but you don't actually have to be in receipt of any benefit to get a blue badge (and once you do have a blue badge, that is often sufficient 'proof of disability')
And to complicate things further, if we are talking about disability discrimination, then a person doesn't need to be in receipt of any of these benefits to be covered by the Equality Act. Many people who don't even think of themselves as disabled are covered by this legislation, which casts a very wide definition of "disabled".
The TL;DR: is that even the concept of "legally disabled" is complex and context dependent.
I think you're also misunderstanding what is being "on disability" in other countries? It seems like your government covers long-term (but not lifelong) illness. Mine doesn't. So the comparison is kind of disingenuous.
Yes, I don't think I quite understand what you mean. Perhaps an example could help me understand?
Really proving my point on the whole "sealioning" thing here.
I'm unaware what that is, I'm sorry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
Now you're aware.
Thank you. I now know what sealioning means. Thank you.