Millions of Men Are Missing from the Job Market

This attitude is what keeps people from being willing to seek help when they suffer from depression or suicidal thoughts for fear that skeptics will judge them as faking or lacking character. As someone who lived for over ten years with multiple undiagnosed mental disorders and suffered significant, unnecesary setbacks as a result, I believe we still have a ways to go before mental health is treated with the appropriate amount of concern.

The real question is, are people who retired early (see /r/financialindependence) counted in this figure? What about trust fund kids? I'd argue that if you have enough money to not need to work, and you aren't, and you don't want to, then you should slot into some category very different than the people who can't work and aren't self-sufficient financially.

A lot of white collar workers in the US end up in a particular catch-22: their jobs are making them sick, but because they are sick, they can't leave their jobs. They become psychologically disabled because of the pressure to return to work before they are well, the stressor of battling the insurance companies, and the suffering from the cultural shame of not actively working.

Finally, after the 12-week FMLA requirement is exceeded, absent any policy, state law, contract, a company can fire an employee for absence after returning from, or even during, disability leave.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that there are some true "fakes" scamming the system. Afterall, the largest cause of disability is Generalized Anxiety Disorder, followed by several other "invisible" disabilities that cannot be objectively verified.

That makes me very upset, given that I sufferered a massively disruptive neuropathic pain disorder that only recently subsided enough to start coding again.

During those few months, I had to hear constant negative feedback from friends and relatives, usually telling me the equivalent of "Tough it out like a man."

This false perception was further compounded by the fact that I didn't look disabled. Every photo on Facebook caused a barrage of "I thought you were sick" comments, not realizing that my medical orders were to learn to resocialize despite the pain. Then that snapshot becomes people's vision of your illness, not realizing that the quiet dinner with your friends was the one hour you spent out of bed that day.

These skeptical responses are certainly due to the widespread deception by some, as you describe. I am just grateful that I had a "hard" medical diagnosis upon which to rely.

But some people really do need the disability insurance, which they have paid to obtain, in order to survive, not lose their homes, and pay for medical care during periods of tremendous suffering.

Everyone, please remember that not all illnesses present to the naked eye, or even to physical examination. We do not fully understand how either the human body, or more importantly, the human brain functions. Without that knowledge, it is almost impossible to tell the genuine afflictions from the false claims.