Can’t work due to bad mental health? You’re a selfish scrounger with no self respect according to the NHS director of mental health Claire Murdoch in the Times On Friday, the Times published a piece lauding the government’s new DWP plan to tackle the supposed ‘worklessness crisis’ by putting work coaches in mental health services.
Not only will this put more pressure on an already struggling NHS (which the government regularly blames disabled people for), but it will also mean anyone seeking support for mental health issues will be forced to focus on getting a job.
Work coaches in NHS mental health services
The Times explained that mental health services will be stocked with teams of employment advisors offering everything from help with CVs to mock interviews. Because when you want to die due to the mounting fear of having your benefits cut, you actually don’t need a therapist – you need someone to show you how to format a CV.
The most perverse thing about the article is the jovial attitude and use of words like ‘offer” which make it seem like this will in any way be a choice. There’s of course no mention of what will happen if disabled people turn down this “offer”.
With the government refusing to remove conditionality from the welfare equation you can only assume that benefits will be dependent on whether patients ‘engage’ with these new work coaches in the same way the current system does.
The article also focused on how services help those who have been unemployed for a long time and seek mental health services have been supported into work. But it doesn’t address the reality that many can’t work and that schemes like this will force them into jobs that could cause their conditions to deteriorate and their mental health to worsen.
Work is NOT a health outcome
So you’d think that mental health practitioners would be against this right? Lol, here’s what Claire Murdoch, director of mental health at NHS England, had to say:
As the NHS, we want to help people find work or keep work. The NHS can, should and does think of itself as a contributor to economic growth.
She continued, by making disabled people feel like a burden:
The NHS is really clear that work is good for you. It’s a way of making a contribution, putting food on your table, being connected to something bigger than just yourself or your own life.
Oh but it got much worse. She finished with:
Work is part of self-respect and self-worth, using your talents, and having structure and meaning to a day.
Nothing instills confidence in those struggling with their mental health like being told by the people running the services that are supposed to help you that they have no self-respect.
As consultant clinical psychologist and activist Dr Jay Watts put it best on Twitter:
Er no. The NHS can, should and does think of itself as a contributor to health.
Dr Watts continued
Mental health staff have a moral duty to reject any ‘health as work’ agenda involving the DWP. DWP sanctions take away respect and the means to survive; integration destroys trust. Fear of DWP policies is so intense, it drives people to starvation. Informed consent is impossible.
The DWP: infecting the NHS with work coaches
The scheme won’t mean disabled people are supported into work. It will instead mean that less disabled people who desperately need these services will be more reluctant to access these services for fear of having their benefits cut.
It will mean that those deemed ‘difficult” whilst having very real mental health crises will be marked as ‘not engaging’ and not only will they lose support, but they’ll also – you guessed it – have their benefits cut.
There’s a lot of talk about Britain’s mental health crisis, but it’s too often through the lens of getting people back into work. If the government is actually committed to helping people with mental health issues it needs to stop seeing us as cogs in a machine and instead as people who are worthy of support.
It’s dangerous to put DWP responsibilities on the NHS, as those two things should never be put together. Unfortunately, it has been going on for years – and the new Labour government appears hell-bent on ramping NHS-DWP integration up.
But more than anything, it shows how blatantly callous the government is. They care more about work than they ever will about disabled people.
So far I see no “change” from the last lot.
Featured image via the Canary
