Disability cases always seem to take forever to process. The disability process will especially seem to take forever for claimants whose finances are rapidly worsening. Sadly enough, most claimants whose cases go as far as the hearing level will probably wind up in terrible financial circumstances. In a disability case, almost any symptom or limitation can be disabling, but to determine whether they preclude work, the relevant questions are how frequent, how severe and how long do they last.

Disability cases are almost always won or lost based on the quality of your medical records and the successive opinions rendered by your treating physicians regarding your ability to sustain full time employment. Once the diagnosis is established, the disability inquiry immediately shifts to why you are unable to work due to the symptoms and limitations that result from the diagnosis. Thus, obtaining a physical or psychological diagnosis is the very beginning and not the end of your disability case. A common problem disability claimants frequently make is having tunnel vision and focusing solely on their diagnosis, as if the fact they have been diagnosed with a disorder automatically confirms they are disabled and entitled to benefits. This is especially true of people suffering from chronic pain and fatigue disorders such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome
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The Social Security Administration will listen to your story about why you are unable to work due to the severity, frequency and duration of your symptoms, but they will also look for supporting evidence from other sources such as doctors or individuals who know the claimant.

In addition, in a social security disability claim, the credibility of the claimant is often the determining factor of whether the claim is approved or denied. For cases involving chronic pain or fatigue, such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, the credibility of the claimant is usually crucial to success. The reason for this of course is due to the fact that those diagnoses involve subjective symptoms and limitations that usually cannot be objectively quantified by medical or laboratory tests.

Social security is legally obligated to take every claim even those that have no chance of winning. This is, to a large extent, the reason why disability cases seem to take forever. However, most applicants for disability have severe problems and need to have their cases evaluated fully and fairly. Thus, the Social Security Administration will not likely ever get into the practice of screening out cases even if the unintended consequences is that disability cases will always seem to take forever.