Hi everyone
I've had a diagnosis in the last couple of years and have got the form in to apply for PIP. Has anyone successfully applied and received this. I've heard it's very much tailored to physical disability and I will probably be refused. Everyone seems to think I should be ready to appeal.
Any thoughts on this would be greatfully received.
I learnt long ago while at school to keep my mouth shut, because opening usually ended up with me getting a pummeling off someone. I also learnt a lot of bad habits like manipulation and lying. All of them highly useful in interview situations or while needing someone to pummel someone else for you. School taught me about the world and how fair it is and how to play the game.
I think you guys are just nice people. It is always harder for nice people to play this particular game.
Snap! After so many decades of masking my autism, concealing my difficulties and always deferring to other people is a reflex response that just pops out with barely any conscious awareness of doing it - sometimes before I've even recognised what I'm being asked. I parrot my usual vague, non-committal; "I'm OK", and then minutes later, I find myself thinking; "why did I say that?".
Although it made little difference in the end, I was so glad to have the disability advocate with me during my assessments. I couldn't begin to count the number of times that he intervened because I was selling myself short or answering irrelevant questions. He tried his best to drum into me beforehand that I needed to emphasise the worst of my traits, but I find it an incredibly difficult thing to do when I'm put on the spot and my only thought is; "get me outta here!".
The problem I have is that I'm a people-pleaser - this sort of assessment is massively skewed against me - I will end up agreeing with manipulative assessors. I really not safe to be interviewed in those circumstances.
What im saying to people who go for assessments is they dont just look at the interview. They look at the cameras, how you act while waiting, how you act while walking to the interview room, non verbal and verbal. So be your worst day. if you dont talk to people on your worst day, then dont talk to them, just write stuff down,make it a real nightmare for them and let them feel a small amount of what you have to deal with.
They will happily screw you over, so give them as little chance to do so as possible.
the lego in your sock trick
Brilliant 
You havent tried the lego in your sock trick then?.....makes walking a treat!
I had my assessment recently and am in the awaiting results phase. i havent used any external groups, filled the form out myself and fully expect not to get it. But I also have a lot of other things wrong with me besides the aspergers. I view any assessment you take over benefits as an acting role you are applying for. They will take the piss, so you shouldnt feel guilty about doing the same. From the second you get to the entrance door, you need to imagine your worst day and then enact it for the benefit of every camera. Walk slowly everywhere, look at the ground all the time and never at anyone. Just lay it on thick, because you know what they are like, we all do.
Maybe im a terible person for doing it, but i've navigated this system a number of times in my life and i know what pure honesty gets you in these situations, regardless of your medical proof, its always a no. Even when embellishing the truth, its no guarantee of success, but if it works it will save you months of appeals.
Trained to ask and observe you to: stand up, clench your fist, move your arm out, walk 10 meters,
The disability advocate who accompanied me asked about the relevance of the assessor's background to a claim primarily for autism. The response was pretty much just that he'd been trained to administer the test procedures to the required standard.
If my assessment was anything to go by, I can't see how much training would be necessary at all, aside from learning a bit of medical terminology. It was perfectly obvious that it was essentially a box ticking exercise, and no useful information was imparted which couldn't have been read from my application forms and autism assessment report, aside from whether I could dance the hokey-cokey. I'm pretty sure that even I could manage to quiz someone about their sandwich making skills, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and ask someone to pull on my fingers (hmm, OK, maybe my dyspraxia might make the last one a bit tricky - but of course, missing his fingers completely a few times was apparently meaningless as I had a nice strong grip!)
And what about the pen-pushers that the reports then get sent to - are they required to have sworn the Hippocratic oath, I wonder?
Strange, I never noticed it before.
Why ex-paramedics?
Is it a cover story?
I suppose saying, ex paramedic gives the impression that assessor is a medical person, a sort of jack of all trades with extensive experience in all kinds of medical situations.
If in reality they are not ex paramedics, then what medical training do they have? if any?
It's weird how many people I've heard say that they were assessed by an ex-paramedic (as I was told, too). I can't help wondering whether this is a sad reflection of how undervalued paramedics are these days, or just some kind of stock cover story (the contracted-out assessment companies have been caught red-handed lying about plenty of other things - including what some claimants have actually said or done during their assessments).
Yes, I've often pondered the irony of a disability benefits system where the process of applying discriminates against people with certain disabilities. There's also the lovely catch-22 whereby many support services assume that you'll pay "top-up" contributions from PIP, but if you don't have the support services yet, the assessors will assume that it's because you're not disabled enough to need them. Or the one where they'll stubbornly refuse to allow you a home visit, threaten to suspend your claim if you don't show up to the assessment, and then mark you down as being independently mobile if you do manage to drag yourself there.
I'm sure that someone at the DWP must have got the notion that the writings of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller are administrative policy guides!
Edited-in:
PS) I was just catching up on the Disability Rights UK site, and apparently the DWP have a new trick up their sleeves. If you're waiting for an appeal, they might ring you up with a "deal or no deal" offer to try to get you to take an instant award at a lower rate than they think you might win at appeal. So it's not just Kafka and Heller - they're stealing ideas from Noel Edmonds now, too! (LINK)
(Oh, and apparently, they're the UK employer who has lost the most Employment Tribunal cases for disability discrimination - for four years in a row!)
I'm another one who scored zero points and still got Zero points at the mandatory reassessment.
I was pushed twice by my local money advice service to apply, and they filled the forms out for me.
The assessor was an ex paramedic, who showed no interest in autism or hidden disabilities, he Just concentrated on the physical such as stretching my arms out and washing etc
I was advised to apply for PIP on my second visit to the job centre but like most of the benefit system it is very autism-unfriendly so I couldn't cope with going through the process. There was no way for me to apply online or for the job centre to do it for me, I had to phone so that scared me off from the beginning and I didn't bother.
I believe that the criteria are related to autism such as struggling to cope with social situations and not being aware although I think the threshold is quite strict nowadays. My cousin told me about someone NT she knew who faked it and easily qualified. She said she eats junk food, doesn't wash or change clothes until someone tells her and struggles to go shopping etc
They have a reputation for bouncing anyone with hidden disabilities - I ended up at a tribunal because they messed me around so much and they lied about everything through the whole process - denying phone calls, posting documents out very late so you have to rush to reply before you're out of time etc.
I have Asperger's, ulcerative colitis, a brain injury, memory problems, CFS, chronic pain, osteoporosis, crazy hypertension and a bunch of other difficulties - and I scored zero points on the first assessment.
Wow well done for persistence. I know they will probably reject me at assessment and I'll probably have to appeal. Which isn't appealing.
Don't set me on too high a pedestal - my sense of balance isn't very good! As I said; if I hadn't had the help and encouragement of the advocate, I doubt very much that I would have persisted beyond the initial rejection.
I think the most important thing for me was to keep reminding myself that, even if things didn't work out, I would be no worse off than I already was. Keeping the "not knowing" anxiety at bay was also crucial - although the process took about a year and a half in total, the actual time spent enduring the most stressful bits was really only three or four days of my life, and during that period, there had been plenty of other stressful things to endure that were completely unrelated to it.
Whether I will cope with reassessment so easily, I have yet to discover - it's only a matter of months now until my award runs out (it was given for four years, but that included the time that I'd already waited). And next time I will likely have to face it without very much support, as the advocacy service I used has since closed due to cutbacks in local authority funding (likewise a couple of others that I might have used).
I received standard-rate daily living after a mandatory reconsideration - I got ZERO points after my assessment.
Apparently, some woman brought a balloon full of water to an assessment, so that she could wet herself, and got a high-enough offer to qualify for motobility. The following day, she bought a new Shogun.
The cheats are cute as foxes.
