One form of disability for which people in Washington State can qualify for Social Security disability insurance is mental illness. There are several psychiatric disorders that the Social Security Administration recognizes as potentially leaving sufferers unable to work. Among these are depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders. These mental conditions tend to be chronic and can make it very difficult or impossible for people to support themselves, which is why SSDI is made available.

One difficulty many people with mental illness face is receiving an accurate diagnosis, which SSDI requires before it will consider granting benefits. Being able to detect the potential for a psychiatric condition before the onset of symptoms may help patients receive treatment and present the strongest possible claim for benefits down the line.

But predicting who is likely to develop a mental illness has always been difficult. Even genetic factors only seem to create a slightly higher risk for the children of those with a mental condition. For example, the child of a person with bipolar disorder has a 10 percent higher risk of developing the disorder him- or herself.

A new study suggests that there is promise in using computer programs to determine risk factors for mental illness. The study gathered 32 healthy teenagers - 16 of which have a parent with bipolar disorder and 16 who do not - and had them watch images of faces on a computer screen. While their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, the participants were asked to determine the gender of the faces, which had either happy, neutral or fearful expressions.

The results were later fed into a computer program tasked with predicting which participants were at a higher risk of developing mental illness later. The computer's predictions turned out to accurate around 75 percent of the time. This indicates that future software might be even more accurate in predicting mental illness.

Source: Medical News Today, "Anxiety And Mood Disorder Risk - Computer Program May Help Identify," Petra Rattue, Feb. 16, 2012