Doubts
A New York Times article from October 2021 describes how the COVID-19 pandemic has made the already difficult and lengthy process of getting approved for Social Security benefits even harder for people with disabilities.
It’s just the latest evidence contradicting one of the most common ableist misconceptions — that qualifying for disability benefits is easy. In reality, getting approved for benefits is a long and often painful process. But the myth of widespread disability fraud persists partly because it dovetails with broader popular suspicions about disabled people. Though rarely spoken of directly, disabled people are often thought of as at best unreliable narrators of their own experience, at worst lazy and greedy scammers.
This general lack of credibility leads to two closely related experiences of ableism most people with disabilities experience at one time or another — for many disabled people quite frequently:
1. People feel entitled to interrogate every claim disabled people make about themselves and their own disability experiences.
2. People seem to believe that faking disability and disability-related needs is a huge problem, and that it’s their duty to root out disability fakers and scammers.
Of course, simply by the law of averages, some suspicions about disabled people must be valid. Some people who say they are disabled probably really aren’t. Some people with disabilities who say they have been discriminated against may be misinterpreting what happened. Some disabled people probably do confuse ordinary challenges with unjust accessibility barriers or lack of accommodation. Some demands for accommodations really aren’t justified.
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Still, it’s insulting and discriminatory to grill a disabled person on their personal life, treat them like a potential con artist, or prevent their equal access — just because you’re a little suspicious of them, or because you have certain views about disability claims in general.
So it’s understandable that non-disabled people especially — but disabled people too sometimes — might wonder what to do if they think something isn’t right about a disabled person’s claims or requests. But while it’s something of a dilemma for those who have questions, it’s important to remember that it’s even more of a problem for disabled people themselves. They have to constantly worry about their credibility and whether they will be taken seriously.
To illustrate, here are some examples:
- A car pulls into an accessible parking spot. There’s an accessible parking placard hanging from the rear view mirror, but the driver gets out and walks away. Is this another non-disabled person thoughtlessly violating a “handicapped” parking space?
- A college student with learning disabilities asks for extra time on exams. Is this really necessary or just an attempt to make testing easier? What about a student who asks for extensions on assignment deadlines because of recent chronic pain flare-ups?
- A disabled person says they have been turned down for 25 jobs in a row they were fully qualified for, and insists it’s because of disability discrimination. Aren’t there other reasons they might not have gotten these jobs?
- A customer comes into a coffee shop with a dog on a leash. When asked she says it’s an emotional support animal. Does the management have to accept that and allow the dog into the shop? What if it’s just someone who really wants their dog with them all the time?
Some of these situations have fairly straightforward answers and set procedures that at least try to prevent subjective guesswork and unwarranted judgement. Yet, more basic questions seem to persist:
- Are you obligated to believe anything a disabled person says about their disability and accommodation needs?
- Do some people who claim to have a disability actually not have one, or claim disability for some ulterior motive or advantage?
- Are some disabled people overly sensitive to disability discrimination? Don’t some use ableism and their disability as excuses for their own failures?
It should be obvious how such questions encourage ableist ideas and actions. But it seems like for many, these questions are hard to resolve or dismiss. Maybe one way to deal with them is to turn them around, and ask:
- Are you, specifically, obligated to decide whether a person’s disability and accommodation claims are valid?
- How much does it matter whether or not someone’s claims about having a disability are completely accurate or honest?
- If some claims of disability discrimination are off-base, does that mean they all are? If ableism is one factor among many in hiring, isn’t that still significant. And does it really matter much whether or not a disabled person perceives every situation exactly right?
These questions have more meaningful and practical answers.
A few people are in professional positions where it is their job to determine the validity of disability claims. Most people in most situations are not. Social Security examiners and judges are specifically charged with deciding who is or isn’t disabled, at least in the sense of being qualified for benefits. It’s their job, and nobody else’s — not friends, relatives, next door neighbors, or casual acquaintances. Schools, colleges, and workplaces also usually have staff who are assigned the task of evaluating requests for disability accommodations. It’s their job, and nobody else’s — not fellow students or coworkers, teachers or professors, or other managers and supervisors.
In cases of genuinely scarce resources that are vital for actual disabled people — such as cash benefits like SSI and SSDI — deliberate fraud is clearly bad. But despite the popular notion of massive cheating to get Social Security benefits, data suggest that fraud rates are actually quite low, by some measures less than 1%.
There is a bit more of a gray area where approving valuable and scarce benefits may be mistaken, but not deliberately deceptive. For example, a person with a heart condition may be approved for disability benefits, even though they might be able to work in certain kinds of jobs with little problem. But that, too, is the kind of determination to be made by professionals, not opinionated bystanders. And there are deep and honest philosophical differences about what should and shouldn’t constitute a disability, and who should be able to get benefits. These are matters for serious study and debate, not rumor-mongering and stigma.
Meanwhile, most disability accommodations aren’t scarce or expensive. A few unqualified people getting them doesn’t affect their availability to “real” disabled people. Schedule changes and due date adjustments generally don’t cost anything, and aren’t some kind of commodity in limited supply. Allowing them for someone who maybe isn’t strictly speaking “disabled” doesn’t really have much consequence or hurt anyone else.
Even accessibility modifications and adaptive devices usually aren’t that expensive, so there is little point in being stingy with them. A different kind of chair or desk, a widened doorway, an entrance ramp, or grab bars in a restroom will benefit others for years anyway. Their value isn’t confined just to one disabled person.
And again, it’s important to remember that getting benefits or accommodations for a disability is both an objectively long and complex process, and an emotionally stressful experience. It is almost never “easy,” even if formal barriers appear to be low. It takes months, sometimes years after the onset or diagnosis of a disability to be approved for benefits like SSI and SSDI. And huge percentages of applications are at least initially denied for “technical” or “medical” reasons. School and workplace accommodations also have less lengthy but often intrusive, even humiliating approval processes. A disabled person may be asked to share and reshare personal medical information that few would ever want to reveal to strangers by choice. Unfortunately, there is often little practical and emotional difference between arguing for a specific accommodation and essentially begging for one.
Plus, because of often intense internalized ableism and outside social pressures, disabled people are more likely to unnecessarily forgo asking for help than they are to ask for too much help. Most people with disabilities are if anything reluctant to ask for help. There is far more risk of a disabled person being fired from a job or dropping out of school because they can’t bring themselves to ask for help than there is of a disabled person gaining one or two petty perks or adjustments they may not precisely deserve. Even in the most lenient and streamlined systems, it costs disabled people something every time they have to ask for help.
Making life harder for disabled people in hopes of curbing rare and mostly meaningless “abuse” by non-disabled people is ineffective and cruel. There is little to no downside to making most disability accommodations easy to get for students, employees, and customers. Think of it as simply another part of helping students and employees thrive and perform at their best, and of encouraging better customer service.
Much the same is true when a disabled person talks about being discriminated against. It can be intensely tempting to pick these stories apart and somehow make things better by refuting them. But unless it is actually your job to judge the situation, reward damages, and dole out punishments, why not just believe them? If a disabled person is a little or a lot wrong about disability discrimination, there is still little harm in just listening and being supportive.
Or, consider the possibility that disabled people might actually be better at accurately identifying disability discrimination than you are. Most disabled people are probably more honest and knowledgeable in general than you may think. Whether they are or not, it’s most likely not your job to decide. And it’s almost never a mistake to relax and give disabled people the benefit of the doubt.
