I am currently undergoing disability evaluation with social security. You need to go to myssa. Gov and fill out an disability application. I would highly recommend hiring a ss lawyer because you will probably lose otherwise. Depending on the severity of your case it might be quick or take a couple of years. However epilepsy is recognized as a disability by the federal gov.

I had to get a lawyer to be on disability. What helped me is I could not work industrial jobs like I had in the past. They factor in what jobs you have done in the past and whether you can perform that type of job. I guess working dangerous jobs helped me in the long run.

Nada I think a good idea is get on the NDIS & then volunteer somewhere, rspca etc, that way you still keep some structure & social connections

When you know more about your seizures you dont have to go to the hospital all the time. I have complex partial and i dont go to the hospital. I had to go when i had one seizure at my son school i fell on the floor. It was Mandatory. But if you are with someone that understand your seizures and you didnt get hurt then you dont have to go to the hospital. If you came out of the seizure ok and you are fine then you dont have to go to the hospital. When it was mandatory and I had to go to the hospital they put me in a bed with a neck brace on and they just left me there I had a seizure again and I pulled off the neck brace off that’s how strong you are when you were in seizure they didn’t do anything.

@A MyEpilepsyTeam Member What is also significant is whether there are special rules for what is determined to be someone unable to work in your province/state or whether there is a universal one for all of Australia.

In the USA, it is based upon the rules of the individual state, and, in Massachusetts, if you are capable of doing ANY paying job, then you are rejected. They do not care if you cannot actually get that job because there are no current jobs available to do it. The goal of Social Security board in MA is to reject as many people as possible and even with a very good lawyer (which I did have) it is difficult to win approval if your neurologist is not really backing your case.
My sister's theory is that my current neurologist has Asperger's (form of autism that is at the top of the spectrum and is currently individuals who are also geniuses, however they have less of a connection to emotions because they are led by logic), thus my neurologist blamed me for failing to achieve a seizure free state and would not acknowledge or even check with a brain scan when I explained my completely unreliable memory recall. And he is the neurologist who took over after my first neurologist finally had to retire because of Alzheimer's and because of one of his errors in his last years, I went 6 months without any "real" sleep because I had Sleep Apnea and was not checked and thus given a CPAP machine. And this was following the damage from 2003 (combination of the error by the pharmacist and then the neurologist) where one thing that I immediately felt (after I was out of a constant seizure state) was the inability to multitask. If I get distracted by anything while doing something, then I forget that I was doing it (have burned some food as a result for an example).

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