How long did the process take for you to be granted disability?
Quite a while. I initially asked social security for the application form somewhere in January 2016 for both the statute of disability and and disability allowance as our health insurer had recommended doing so, confident that I'd get approved. However I could not fill out the entire form at that time. I could fill in my parts but 1/3 of the application form had to be filled in by one of the specialists working on getting a diagnosis for my disease. So I couldn't just let my general physician fill it in for me. My next appointment with the team working on my case was somewhere in June 2016 I believe as they were running a DNA test at the time that took ~5 months so I contacted social security for an extension of the deadline to send in my application until some time after that appointment.
DNA test for CPT-2 deficiency ended up negative so aside from some new discoveries regarding my hormones I didn't have much new to add to the form. The specialists filled in their part of the form, recommending the statute of disability be granted despite no diagnosis.
So I sent the application along with my entire medical file (imagine a gigantic load of paperwork) to social security shortly after that appointment.
The process of approval then took another several months. I was contacted for a medical examination by a social security physician in early october 2016. He didn't really examine me much because my symptoms generally aren't visible with a few exceptions. He basically said he'd examined my medical files and said that was more than enough examination for him. He said he would recommend approval and was confident I'd get it too.
He also stated that the process could take another month or 2. The disability allowance application would be handled after I received the statute of disability.
I was approved for that statute somewhere mid-November. The letter included that my allowance application was now being processed after approving my disability application. They initially said I'd be contacted probably in early to mid-December but towards the end of the month I still hadn't received anything. After emailing them they said I'd receive a letter within a week, which ended up being a little over 2 weeks. So this was around January 10 2017 at the time. The letter said I had to send in my tax form for 2015, which contained €0 in income so I sent it right away. By April I still hadn't heard anything back so I contacted them again and they said the decision would be finalized next month. I think it was at the end of April or early May that I received the letter with the decision to grant me €651 per month starting from January 2016, the date I first asked social security for the application form. So this week I received my first payout for the month of June and the backpayments for all the months from January 2016 to now.
In short, the entire process of asking for the application forms for the statute of disability and a monthly allowance took from January 2016 to May 2017. The approval process for the disability statute was from January 2016 to November 2016.
And this was despite repeatedly emailing them to speed up the process. When I applied for the renewal of my national ID at our town hall a while back I also inquired about the approval process with someone from the town's social services division. She said the equipment at the disability subdivision of the federal social security agency were very outdated and really the only way to speed up the process is to repeatedly contact them.
Not that long ago there was a segment on our cable news about the horribly outdated equipment at the social security agency. In some cases they were still using those old Windows 2004 computers.