"I know there are people scamming the system -- I've seen them." So said a guy about a year ago who was then renting a room in my house. I tried to tell him that people had previously told me he was scamming the system, in an effort to make the point that unless you really know someone, you can't judge their disability, but every time I tried to say that, he got very defensive about his genuine need for assistance. I didn't question his need, and I told him so, but he couldn't understand how anyone could think he was a scammer, and he kept telling me that he knew for a fact that undeserving people were scamming the system. He veered into racist territory a few times in referring to those undeserving types, but as I mentioned in a 2/26/14 blog on Blogger, racism is usually a sign of stupidity, so when someone starts to say dumb things, if they talk long enough, they'll probably say something racist, and for this diary, I'd like to focus on the other dumb things he said.
I've heard the stories for most of my life, and without knowing the facts, I tended to believe them early on, though life has since taught me many times not to make such judgments without first-hand knowledge of the circumstances. I remember an apartment manager in Alameda, CA, telling me a few entertaining and unusual stories, and then among them he threw in the usual disability scammer tale. The person collecting the disability check, who rented a place in one of the managed buildings, supposedly had severe back problems, but, as the tale always goes, the manager witnessed the disabled guy doing things that someone with such back problems could not possibly do, leading to the obvious conclusion. I believed the story-teller's first-hand account of what he had witnessed, and at the time I had no possible counter explanation, but life can teach you some answers if you actually want to learn them, and since then, I have learned quite a few.
About that guy living in my house, I had truly been told that he was scamming the system, and the people who told me this cautioned me against renting him a room. I could tell from just knowing him a little that he was a bit of a get-over, and I couldn't tell how much I could trust him, but I also knew that I couldn't judge whether or not he had good reasons for his disability status, and that I'd have to know him better before I could make that judgement.
Initially, I did think maybe the guy was getting over on the system. He told me he had, in his younger years, worked hard and made a 6-figure salary, but he felt frustrated that most of his money went to pay for his alimony and child support, so at a certain point he decided there was no point in working so hard, and he just gave up. That sounded like a scammer. In addition, he was generally a cool guy, who had been a biker until the injuries finally caught up with him and he had to sell his Harley. He also had some programming and electrical skills, which included showing me how to wire an electric dryer circuit. Added up, that mostly looked like a scammer, although the biker injuries did give me a clue that maybe he might have some genuine need for the disability status.
Over time, though, I began to notice and understand the pattern, and I eventually figured it out without him admitting it to me -- he was bipolar. That explained his alcoholism, and also the days when he didn't seem to sleep at all, contrasted, only a few days later, with days when he seemed to not get out of bed for 36 or 48 hours. Sometimes he could barely get up and down the stairs, due to his back pain, and other times, he almost bounded up and down those stairs. If you saw this behavior from a distance, you might think he was faking it with the back pain thing, but he had no reason to put on an act for me.
Understanding the nature of bipolar disorder, I now believe that it holds the key to many, and possibly even most, of those disability scammer stories. If you didn't know my renter's tale, you could easily believe he was scamming the system, and some people who knew him did believe that. If you saw him out in public, when he was at the top curve of that cycle, he seemed fine, and he didn't look or act like he was in pain, because he wasn't, but you also wouldn't know that maybe 2 or 3 days of the previous 7 or 8, he was in so much physical or psychic pain that he didn't even get out of bed, and that on other days, when he did try to get out of bed, he could barely make it up and down the stairs. As is so often the case in life, once again, the lesson is Judge Not, especially if you don't have all the evidence. My renter hadn't learned that lesson, and so, ironically, he was looking at other people much like himself, though he couldn't see the similarity, probably due at least in part to his focus on the color of their skin, and he was judging them to be scammers, just as others judged him. Knowing his story, I knew he wasn't a scammer, and if I could know their stories, I would bet that most if not all of the ones he judged to be scammers are in reality not scammers either. Not knowing their stories, I'm more than willing to grant them their benefits without any great concern about how they might be getting over on the system -- I'll bet they're not.