Getting social security disability is a small nightmare and can take months. The majority of initial claims (60%+) are rejected and you'll have to appeal.
Which, you know, is no problem at all if you're actually so injured you can't work.
I wanted to be truthful and didn't know off the top of my head what, say, the median time for a claim to be accepted was.
I remember it being something like 2-5 months to get a response, so multiply that by the number of appeals (up to 4, I think) and my ballpark estimate is that the median time-to-acceptance for all eventually-accepted claims is around 6-18 months.
So, I figured saying "could take months" was a more honest thing than saying "could take years." If the median time were greater than a year, after all, "it could take months" is still true, but the converse isn't true! If I had said "years" instead of "months" and was wrong, someone could easily have replied, saying, "You're exaggerating. The median time to acceptance is 9 months, not years. The claims that take years are exceptional cases."
In any case, I didn't know, so I wanted to err on the side of intellectual honesty. That'll teach me. :P
Heh, sorry about my reply. I was just speaking from being on the end of having a parent who went through the process. I seem to remember it taking on the order of more than a year. Good news is it is retroactive from when you apply though. This was over 20 years ago, things might have changed since.
Which, you know, is no problem at all if you're actually so injured you can't work.