Getting Social Security Disability Step 2: How to Prove Severe Impairment

The SSA Listing of Impairments & Your Disability Claim

The Social Security Administration (SSA) keeps a list of impairments that it recognizes as potentially qualifying for disability benefits.

The SSA listing of impairments includes dozens of mental and physical health conditions. It also provides guidelines for how to prove the need for disability benefits with each condition.

If you don’t see your diagnosis on the list, however, that doesn’t mean your disability benefits claim is doomed.

With help from your health care providers, you can document for Social Security how your particular ailments and symptoms undercut your ability to work—which is the main requirement for benefits no matter what illness you have.

Social Security has a measure for the level of daily activity you can handle, which it calls your “residual functional capacity,” or RFC.

This accounts for your major qualifying impairment, but also any other health problems you have, severe or less severe, and how they combine to make working impossible.

You’ll need to submit records from your treatment, such as:

• Reports from medical exams
• Laboratory test results
• Physical test results
• Medical imaging
• Documentation of your diagnosis
• Records of hospitalizations
• Psychological evaluations
• Programs of mental or physical therapy
• Prescription medication lists
• Results of your treatment plans

Do you need advice that personally addresses your situation? That’s what we do. Talk to the Tulsa disability attorneys at Troutman & Troutman for a FREE evaluation of your disability case.