Not because they do not count. They count exactly as much as a physical condition. The difficulty is that the form asks about cooking, washing and journeys, and never once asks how you feel.
See what your form should say → Free on one activity. No payment, no signup.In the DWP's own figures to January 2026, psychiatric disorder was the most commonly recorded condition on PIP claims at 39%, ahead of every physical category. You are not making an unusual claim.
Not eating because you cannot face cooking is Activity 1. Not washing for days is Activity 4. The descriptors ask what you can do, never why.
PIP asks what you can do on more than half the days, safely and repeatedly. A good morning does not cancel out a fortnight of bad ones.
Most people we see with a mental health condition are not short of difficulties. They are short of a way to write them down that a decision maker will score. Two things go wrong again and again.
The first is minimising. "I manage" is the most expensive sentence on the form. People write it because they have spent years being told to cope, and because describing your worst days to a stranger feels like complaining. The form is not asking whether you are coping. It is asking what actually happened this month.
The second is describing the feeling instead of the effect. "My anxiety is severe" scores nothing. "I have not answered my front door since March, and my sister does my shopping because I cannot go into a supermarket" scores. The second sentence is not more dramatic than the first. It is just usable.
You tell it your conditions, roughly how they affect you, and pick one activity. It writes the answer the way the form needs it: the specific difficulty, the frequency, the safety and reliability wording the descriptors are scored against, and the parts people forget to mention.
It takes about two minutes, and you keep whatever it produces.
Try one activity free →Nothing here is behind a payment. These guides are free and cover the ground in detail:
Nothing on this page is about exaggerating. Assessors read a great many forms and an inflated one is easy to spot, and it damages a claim that would have succeeded on its own facts. The aim is the opposite: to describe an ordinary bad week accurately, including the parts you would normally leave out because they feel embarrassing or too small to mention.
If your claim is refused, that is a stage rather than an ending. Around two thirds of appeals that reach a tribunal succeed, and you have one month from the decision letter to ask for a Mandatory Reconsideration. For formal, individual advice, Citizens Advice and local welfare rights services offer free regulated help.