"You"= your doc who fills out a packet with specific questions; and maybe a lawyer who processes the massive amounts of other paperwork, and argues your case, and charges about 20% of a year's award.

"show" has a very specific legal definition: whatever the judge feels like that day. I have been involved in thousands of these SSI cases, and to describe the system as arbitrary is to describe Blake Lively as "fair."

"Permanently disabled" means the illness prevents you from ever working. "But what happens when you get cured?" Where are you calling from, the future? You can't cure bipolar.

"Medical illness" means anything. The diagnosis doesn't matter, only that "you" show how the diagnosis makes it impossible for you to work. Some diagnoses are easier than others, but none are impossible. "Unable to work" has specific meaning, and specific questions are asked: ability to concentrate, ability to complete a workweek, work around others, take criticism from supervisors, remember and execute simple/moderately difficult/complex requests and tasks, etc.

Fortunately, your chances of being awarded SSI are 100%. ("Not for me!" Again, it's not for you.) You may be awarded it on the first try; you may be denied and then get it on appeal; you may need an SSI hearing before the judge; or you may apply five or six times and finally get it after ten years. But if you are persistent, you will get it.

The system isn't flawed, it isn't easily gamed: it is set up this way on purpose. The government wants you to get SSI, because it wants you off the state welfare budget and onto the federal budget, which, as you know, has unlimited funds because it can run deficits, print money, and invade nations and invent words.

In 2009 SSI paid 8M people about $45B. 60% of those under 65 had a "mental disorder." Did many have a legitimate disorder? Sure. Whatever. But when the system ties benefits to a mental disorder, the point is the benefits, not the mental disorder.

What you should be asking is why, if society has decided to give the poor a stipend of $600/month, does it do this through the medical establishment and not as a traditional social policy? And the answer is very simple:

1. you, America, would go bananas if poor people got money for nothing, you can barely stand it when they get it for a disability;

2. if you offload a social problem to medicine, if you medicalize a social problem, then you've bought yourself a generation or two to come up with a new plan or invade someone.

Do you want riots in the streets? How much does it cost to prevent LA (or the city of your choice) from catching fire? Answer: $600/month/person, plus Medicaid. Medicalizing social problems has the additional benefit of rendering society not responsible for those social ills. If it's a disease, it's nobody's fault. Yay empiricism.

Those who are arguing about the cost of healthcare or think that poor people are lying to get benefits are completely and utterly missing the point of the system. It wants this in the hands of doctors, because it would be toxic to everyone else. Can you imagine your Senator deciding who gets benefits and who doesn't?

And maybe these people get some meds as well. You know what counts as an outcome in inner city psychiatry? Guy doesn't punch his kid in the face. One less instance of domestic violence a month. "Well, goddam, I don't see those in the DSM-V. How much is that outcome going to cost us?" $600/month + Abilify+ Xanax + Celexa. But you then can pretend it doesn't exist.

SSI is 100% a gimmick, but the gimmick is 100% hidden from you. The gimmick isn't that poor people game the disability system to get cash payments, the gimmick is that the only way to deliver cash payments to poor people is through the pretense of disability, hence mental illness and pain disorders. Whether they are "disabled" or not is totally and completely irrelevant, poor people are going to get the money one way or another so that they don't riot, but in order to prevent everyone else from rioting, deniability is created: "look, doctors-- SCIENCE-- said they are medically disabled, it's out of our hands!" So your anger is safely diverted: "they're gaming the system!" No. That is the system. If they were gaming it, someone would get caught. No one gets caught.