“For the state, I am absolutely healthy.” Monologue of a “disabled person without a disability” - about helping people with several diagnoses

Ivan Makarov is 37 years old, he lives in Belgorod in a small dorm room. Due to a combination of chronic illnesses and mental health issues, he lost his next job and livelihood. “Such Things” recorded a monologue by Ivan, who calls himself “a disabled person without a disability” and is trying to prove to the state that people like him really need help.

Photo: Myles Bloomfield / Myles Bloomfield

Salvation by youth

There are categories of people, it seems to me, who initially already have a huge number of predispositions in order to fall apart with the next blow of fate and the next health problem. I’m 37 years old—it seems like I’m still young, but I’ve already fallen apart.

Since childhood, I was sickly, although I tried to harden myself and went in for sports: karate, went to the gym, tried to run, pedaled a bicycle. All this specifically to keep yourself in good shape and have good health.

I started having headaches and panic attacks as a child. I think this is due to congenital vascular defects .

For a child, this condition is scary and incomprehensible.

My parents, who grew up during the Soviet Union, could not understand the scale of my health problems. But I don't blame them, because they did everything in their power. We visited provincial neurologists several times, but they did not understand what was happening to me. Once they even took me to see my grandmother-whisperer, who poured wax figures. But even then I probably needed serious medical help.

Until recently, I did not sit at home and did not consider myself a sick person. I have a higher pedagogical education with an additional specialty in biology. After graduating from university, I worked at a school, then got a job as a surveyor. There was a year when I rushed to St. Petersburg and worked there as a picker in a hypermarket.

During this period, I realized that I didn’t do many things as well as other people. For example, some of my colleagues took extra shifts at work, and in less than a year in St. Petersburg I was completely exhausted. True, then my youth still saved me. I returned to my parents in Belgorod, worked for some time in a family store on a relaxed schedule - this helped me recover, after which I again began to look for my niche.

I repaired electronics for about 10 years. All this time, my health was gradually deteriorating, despite my exercise and proper nutrition, which I tried to adhere to.

When my gastrointestinal diseases worsen, I sometimes live for weeks on practically nothing but rice. When problems with the head intensify, it feels as if someone is pressing on the neck and blocking the blood flow. And the most difficult thing is a mental state that is difficult to even describe. This is probably most similar to the withdrawal of an addict - when it seems that your head is being torn from the inside.

Photo: Vlad Zaytsev / Unsplash.com

So, at first little by little, and then finally I had to push sports into the background. It turned out that I lost another crutch that had supported me for many years.

Last work

All this time I tried to adapt to life and jumped from job to job: I settled down, endured it, but several months passed and I again suffered from exacerbations: I suffered from pain in my stomach, then in my head, then I was overcome by anxiety. Managers usually met me halfway and gave me sick leave. In general, I am a responsible employee, but at some point I became almost bedridden, and then I had to quit, the sick leave was not endless.

After leaving each job, I usually recovered for a month or two, then looked for work again and again stepped on the same rake.

When you are constantly stressed and desperate because you don’t know what to live on for the next month, your psyche can’t stand it. The headache began to hurt more often and more severely. Life has turned into a system of vicious circles: illness, inability to work, problems with finances, mental health, misunderstanding of relatives. All this pressed and pulled me down.

In the summer of 2025, I was finally pinned down. Bursting headaches and severe weakness began. The exacerbations continued for months. Then I left my last job.

Throughout the fall of 2025, I either lay at home, or ran to paid IVs, or went to doctors and tried to get help from state medicine. Somehow I did an MRI at my own expense - my mother helped me pay for it. Problems with blood vessels, the spine, signs of chronic cerebral ischemia and intracranial pressure were discovered. At doctors’ appointments, I often encountered an indifferent attitude: here’s a pill for a headache, here’s an examination in a couple of minutes.

Photo: Tim Oun / Unsplash.com

At the same time, I tried to treat my psyche: I was in a psychiatric hospital, but I could not stay there for long. IPA hospitals are far from being the places where people feel better. Some kind of psychotherapy, human conditions of detention, human attitude - this is not about ordinary regional mental health centers.

One day I came across a forum on chronic pain and became acquainted with the Astra Foundation . I told my story there, submitted an application, and they helped me get treatment for headaches at a Moscow clinic.

The extract from there indicates that my work capacity is indeed reduced and I am recommended to undergo a medical and social examination. It was important for me, if only because someone finally saw the whole situation.

Between two worlds

For many years now I have been living alone in a dorm room in Belgorod. When I was working, I saw people and it helped me to be distracted. I have very little social activity outside of these four walls these days. I felt like the isolation was killing me.

At some point, I started looking for other people in a similar situation on online forums and communities. I met people with chronic pain, severe anxiety disorders, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Photo: Myznik Egor / Unsplash.com

Gradually a self-help group gathered around me. It is very small, and the people there are very vulnerable - the participants had to be carefully selected so that no one would further injure anyone. This is how a group appeared on Telegram, where people help each other with advice and motivate each other when they have no strength at all.

Now my mother supports me, although she is a pensioner. She gives me 600 rubles a day to live on, but her resources are not endless, and I feel a huge sense of guilt before her.

I am an absolutely healthy person for the state, as well as for society. Just a strange man with two arms and two legs who for some reason doesn't work.

I don't get any payments, I don't have any benefits

This is probably one of the scariest things about my situation: there is a world of relatively healthy people, and there is a world of people with disabilities. But people like me find themselves somewhere between these worlds. I call us "disabled people without disabilities" - too sick for normal life, but not sick enough for the care system, although we cannot live and work normally.

I am currently undergoing a medical and social examination procedure. The documents have already been accepted, and I am waiting for the review itself. One of the problems is that the system is good at recognizing obvious disabilities - when a person is missing an arm, missing a leg, or has a disease that is easy to measure with numbers and tests. If a person has several diagnoses, each of which in itself looks like just a line on a medical record, it is much more difficult to prove that you actually cannot work and need disability benefits.

It seems to me that such people need not only medicines and not only money. We need places where you can recover and not be alone. Something like assisted living is not a mental hospital, not a closed institution, but a place where a person can come to his senses a little, feel that he is not dying alone. It is important to get out of isolation and feel like a person among people again.

I'm not telling my story because I gave up. On the contrary, I’m trying to find ways out for myself and at the same time understand how I can help people like me. One of the things that still keeps me from completely giving up is the thought that someday this experience could grow into a normal system of help or even a fund for people like me.