Robert R. McGill Administrative Law Blog on Lawyers.com

   I have often spoken about the "process" of filing, but that mostly concerns the administrative ordeal of filing:  of preparing, of gathering the medical documentation, of writing up the proper applicant's statement, of putting together the legal arguments in support thereof, etc.  Then, of course, I have spoken about the "human" side of things -- of the difficult human ordeal of going through the process.  There is the initial psychological barrier -- of starting the administrative process, which is somewhat of an implicit acknowledgment that a person is indeed "disabled", as if that concept or label has some sort of a "stigma" attached thereto.  One would think that in the 21st Century, all such stigmas would have been extinguished and extinct; and, indeed, most such stigmas are merely self-imposed.  Often, we are our own worst enemy; there is the barrier of ourselves in the process, of actually starting the process.  This is often why an attorney is the best person to handle a Federal Employee Medical Retirement Application -- because it allows for the process to begin, without it being so intimately and personal a matter to the applicant.

Sincerely, Robert R. McGill, Esquire