Michigan Disability Resistance

SUMMARY: More than two years ago, the Social Security Advisory Board (board) committed itself to exploring how to strengthen the representative payee (rep payee) program of the Social Security Administration (SSA), which serves more than eight million vulnerable beneficiaries/recipients. This paper summarizes the board’s recommendations for both immediate changes by SSA and a plan for broader government-wide action. The board found broad interest in improving SSA’s rep payee program and reached bipartisan agreement on how to do so.

The report provides short-term recommendations to SSA and Congress which the board believes will strengthen the current administrative process and create a more manageable monitoring role. The board also advocates for the Office of Management and Budget to pursue long-term structural changes which will involve comprehensive government-wide coordination efforts and cross-agency reforms.

This report is organized into five parts. Part I highlights the size and expected growth of SSA’s rep payee program. Part II examines the processes for determining the need for and the selection of rep payees. Part III provides an overview of SSA’s program monitoring. Part IV discusses the need for inter-agency collaboration. Part V lists all the board’s recommendations discussed and contained within each of the aforementioned sections. The appendices of the report provide a brief history of the rep payee program, a summary of the National Academies study on financial capability, an overview of the board’s work on rep payee issues and of the board’s 2017 forum on rep payees, and a description of an online chart collection that accompanies the report. 

• Improving Social Security’s Representative Payee Program 

• Board's recommendations to SSA, Congress and OMB 

• Representative Payee Chart Collection

Controversial powers to treat mental health patients in the community while seriously curtailing their freedoms have been criticised by one of their strongest supporters.

Popularly known as "psychiatric Asbos", Community Treatment Orders (CTOs) were introduced five years ago after a series of high-profile cases that involved mentally ill people attacking members of the public. The draconian measures have now been shown to make no clinical difference – and the psychiatrist who championed them is calling for their immediate suspension.

CTOs gave doctors legal authority to impose conditions on their patients after they are released from hospital such as where they must live, what drugs they must take and even how much alcohol they could consume.

If they broke any of these stipulations they could be immediately recalled and sectioned to a psychiatric unit.

There's a trial scheduled in March at the marble courthouse in Newark, N.J., of a man charged with kidnapping and raping a young woman with an intellectual disability.

That makes the rape of someone with an intellectual disability one of the easiest crimes to get away with. A perpetrator is free to rape again. And that's one reason people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at more than seven times the rate of people without disabilities. NPR obtained that number from unpublished data provided by the Justice Department.

Past research has found that people diagnosed with “schizophrenia” have significantly higher mortality rates than the general population, often due to co-occurring medical issues including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and suicide. In fact, research conducted in the UK has demonstrated that the mortality gap between the general population and individuals diagnosed with bipolar and schizophrenia is widening. Intervention and treatment efforts have shifted to early intervention programs which have demonstrated improved outcomes including a reduction in suicide risk.

However, the authors of this study point out that the “United States has been slower to focus on early intervention” which has resulted in a lack of knowledge regarding how persons who have experienced a first-episode of psychosis utilize treatment. To fill this gap, the authors of the present study looked at longitudinal patterns of outpatient treatment, inpatient treatment, emergency room visits, and mortality rates in a national cohort of individuals who had experienced a first-episode of psychosis.

Individuals with an inpatient, emergency, or outpatient visit that had received a diagnosis of schizophrenia, brief psychotic disorder, or psychotic disorder not otherwise specified (NOS) between the ages of 16-30 were identified. Information was gathered on mortality within a year of receiving a psychosis diagnosis, use of pharmacotherapy, and health service use including outpatient, inpatient, and emergency care.

A total of 1357 individuals were included. 85% of patients were under 25 years of age when they received the initial psychosis diagnosis and 61% of those included were male.

When I finally managed to make it to university and started interacting with people who were not my immediate family, it was painfully obvious that I couldn’t hear what they were saying and that, when it came to conversation, I had pretty much been operating on guesswork for quite a while.

I am not profoundly deaf and, obviously, can hear more with my hearing aids in, although they only make things louder, not clearer. I can’t hear any high-pitched sounds and, with my hearing aids in, I only properly catch one word in three.

When I was 17, I was diagnosed with hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies (HNPP), which results in extreme palsy in my arms as well as patches of skin being numb, difficulty gripping things, weakness in limbs and severe fatigue. I also have mixed connective tissue disorder (MCTD), an autoimmune disease in which the body’s defence system attacks itself. MCTD causes chronic joint pain, muscle inflammation, hypermobility and pulmonary hypertension alongside a long list of other symptoms.

My disabilities can hamper everything I do, but they are often invisible, although I don’t think the days I have to use a wheelchair or wrist splints make them visible – they are just my aids.

I often have to explain myself when strangers think I am just being difficult. I get scoffed at in the street when I don’t hear someone behind me or I walk into them because they are on my blind slide. I have been called out loudly by non-disabled people for using disabled toilets or parking spaces, challenged for being a picky eater when I cannot eat an ingredient in their food and yelled at for being inconsiderate. It doesn’t matter when I explain that I am not just dozy or silly, but have a disability, because they have already worked themselves up into a self-righteous rage and nothing I can say will stop that.

It also hurts to have to explain painful, long and complicated reasons behind injuries when people expect a light-hearted story. “What happened to your hand? Accident while out on the town?”