Activism – the free psychotherapy network

Momentum “The World Transformed” Policy Lab on Capitalism and Mental Health – Saturday 21st Sept 3.00-5.30 in Brighton

Nicola Saunders and Paul Atkinson are organising an event at Momentum’s The World Transformed on Capitalism and Mental Health on Saturday 21st September at 3.00 – 5.30 pm in Brighton. Jacqui Dillon and Malcolm Philips are joining us to introduce the meeting.

The focus of the event is to gather together from the people at the meeting concrete proposals for radical alternative policies on mental health for the next Labour Manifesto. This will be part of Momentum’s Policy Lab programme through which an alternative manifesto will be presented by John McDonnell and others to the LP manifesto discussion.

Our aim is to quickly identify together the main policy areas and spend as much time as possible in smaller groups discussing and formulating policy proposals for each area. It really matters then that we manage to attract as wide a range of experience and opinion on transforming mental health policy.

The online Momentum flyer for the event lists five “speakers”. This is a bit misleading. In fact, Nicola will chair; Malcolm, Jacqui and Paul will kick things off with very brief talking points around the kind of issues we face in the mental health arena; Jon Ashworth, shadow Minister for Health, will say something brief at the end of the session.

As far as possible, the meeting will belong to the people who come along. So please come if you can. Get tickets here. And please circulate the invite to anyone who might be interested.

Warm greetings from Paul and Nicola
Contact paulwilliamatkinson@gmail.com

Can FPN find a place in community networks?

Without real practical connections becoming alive and sparking between people in communities, then politics dies.This is George Monbiot’s thesis. Monbiot – activist, researcher and writer – has been laying out his vision of a reborn politics based on a thick web of interconnected grass roots and community activities.

Given the state of so many shattered communities, today’s politics can easily become all about argument and policy. It gets to seem dry, thinned out and irrelevant to most people. Live connected communities are essential if politics is to become vital and relevant to most people.

Over the last 20 years, the winds of globalisation have ripped through many communities and towns, atomising us, breaking down real connectivity between people. Recently it has become public knowledge just how many people are living such lonely isolated lives, that they may not speak to another person in a whole week. George Monbiot has written in the Guardian (8th Feb 2017 ):

“It is in the powder of shattered communities that anti-politics swirls, raising towering dust-devils of demagoguery and extremism. These tornadoes threaten to tear down whatever social structures still stand. When people are atomised and afraid, they feel driven to defend their own interests against other people’s. In other words, they are pushed away from intrinsic values such as empathy, connectedness and kindness, and towards extrinsic values such as power, fame and status.”

We need to restore community life in all its many varieties as a solution and response to the many crises we face. George Monbiot argues for creating thick networks – ” projects that develop a dense participatory culture ” – and he cites the example of Rotterdam in Holland where one estimate suggests there are now 1, 300 civic projects in the city. In the same article, Monbiot also looks at Todmorden in Yorkshire.

The question that I want to ask is this – is this movement that is participatory grass roots network the sort of movement that FPN should be linking up to, and contributing to? If Yes, then how do we start to do that?

Andy Metcalf

February 2017

United against welfare cuts and welfare reform: report from the lobby of the British Psychological Society conference, 18th January 2017

The challenge to the government’s draconian welfare reforms are gathering momentum, and as part of this campaigners from across Merseyside and even as far afield as London gathered outside the annual BPS Clinical Psychology Conference at the Hilton Hotel, Liverpool on Wednesday 18^th January. The British Psychological Society (BPS) is the professional body for UK psychologists and has been working with the government on aspects of its welfare reform programme.

Service users/survivors, mental health workers and clinicians from a range of groups including Psychologists Against Austerity (PAA), Mental Health Resistance Network, Disabled People Against Cuts, Social Work Action Network (SWAN) as well as trade unionists arrived bright and early at the venue to share our concerns with conference attendees. There is strong evidence of the detrimental impact of welfare reform on claimants with mental health needs so we are calling on the BPS to withdraw from all work with the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) and join us in demanding the government end their harmful welfare reform programme.

Campaigners from a number of groups united to send a powerful message to the BPS leadership

As a result of our lobby, delegates informed us that welfare reform had become a major discussion point for attendees inside. Then as a result of this pressure a call came through to inform us that Peter Kinderman, president of the BPS, had invited us to address the conference the following day to explain our position and present our demands.

The next morning a group of campaigners representing the breadth of our alliance –service-users/survivors, a carer, and activists from North West Psychologists Against Austerity, Mental Health Resistance Network and SWAN – spoke to 300 psychologists at the first session of the conference. The group shared a strong message about the effects of welfare reform and called on the BPS to withdraw from all collaboration with the Department of Work & Pensions. In his response BPS president Peter Kinderman accepted some of our arguments but maintained that the BPS needs to continue to work with the DWP to get its perspectives heard. We reject this argument. We believe continued BPS involvement only lends credibility to the government, and BPS withdrawal would send a strong message about clinicians’ and service users’ concerns. We will continue to call for an end to all collaboration between the BPS and DWP.

Campaigners are invited onstage to address 300 psychologists at the BPS Conference

The DWP is an unethical body that is damaging the lives of claimants with mental health needs.

The statistics and evidence on the harmful impact of welfare reform are clear:

20,000 people with mental health difficulties had their benefits sanctioned in 2015
Following Work Capability Reassessment, there is a greater risk of suicides, self-reported mental health problems, and antidepressant prescribing (Barr et al, 2015)
2,380 people died shortly after being declared able to work between 2011 and 2014
Government & corporate collaborators are imposing psychological explanations for unemployment, together with mandatory activities intended to modify beliefs, attitude, disposition, or personality – this is being called psychocompulsion (Friedli & Stearn, 2015)
The United Nations “is deeply concerned about the various changes in the entitlements to, & cuts in, social benefits introduced by the Welfare Reform Act 2012 & the Welfare Reform & Work Act 2016”. The UN has called on the Government to: “Review the entitlement conditions & reverse the cuts in social security benefits introduced by” these Acts

However we believe that this action and the growing campaigns around the country are starting to make a difference on this issue. A number of clinical psychologists attending the conference told us that the lobby and ensuing discussions would help to strengthen their voices within the BPS to make the case against the organisation’s involvement with the DWP.

We believe that when service users/survivors, psychologists and other mental health workers come together we are stronger. We will keep building alliances to pressure the BPS to withdraw from involvement with the DWP and to bring an end to the government’s wider programme of welfare cuts, reforms and psychocompulsion. If you would like to get involved please email us on mhwelfarereform2016@gmail.com.

Mental Wealth Alliance response to the psy professional bodies’ statement on benefit sanctions and mental health 30/11/16

From:

Mental Wealth Alliance[1]

Mental Health Resistance Network; Disabled People Against Cuts; Recovery in the Bin; Boycott Workfare; The Survivors Trust; Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy; College of Psychoanalysts; Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility; Psychologists Against Austerity; Free Psychotherapy Network; Psychotherapists and Counsellors Union; Social Work Action Network (Mental Health Charter); National Unemployed Workers Combine; Merseyside County Association of Trades Union Councils; Scottish Unemployed Workers’ Network; Critical Mental Health Nurses’ Network; National Health Action Party.

To:

British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies

British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

British Psychoanalytic Council

British Psychological Society

United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy

30^th January 2017

MWA response to the psy professional bodies’ statement on benefit sanctions and mental health 30^th November 2016

We welcome the call from the psychological therapy bodies for the government to suspend the use of sanctions by the DWP subject to the outcomes of an independent review of its welfare policies and their potential damage to the mental health of benefit claimants. Given the accumulation of evidence over many years of the material and psychological suffering inflicted on benefit claimants by workfare-based conditionality[2], it has been frankly shocking that the professional bodies directly concerned with the mental health of the nation have preferred to welcome and participate in workfare policies rather than publicly and vociferously dissociate themselves.

The timing of the statement is given to be the recent report on sanctions by the National Audit Office. Welcome as its report is, the NAO’s perspective on government policy is primarily monetary, not one of health, ethics and social justice. Its “vision is to help the nation spend wisely”. The choice of this timing represents realpolitik on the part of the professional bodies no doubt, as perhaps is the intention of the conditional statement: “The sanctions process may be detrimental to people’s mental health and wellbeing”. But surely as psychotherapists and counsellors we can do better to represent the overwhelming evidence of personal suffering on such a scale than point to poor returns on expenditure and an ambivalent proposal that sanctions may be detrimental to people’s mental health.

Sanctions are only one dimension, albeit at the sharp end, of a welfare regime based on the political assertion that people need to be coerced off benefits and “nudged” into work. The psychological pressure of WCA and PIP assessments, job search rules, work programmes on “good employee” behaviours and the regular cuts to welfare benefits generally are part and parcel of the psycho-compulsion of the DWP benefits regime.[3]

We dispute the government’s premise that work is a therapeutic priority for people suffering from mental health difficulties. The marshalling of evidence for this modern-day workhouse mentality lacks both substance and integrity. Work has become the ideological mantra for neoliberal welfare policies.

Obviously where people want to work and where employment possibilities exist that will support and nourish people’s mental health, then encouragement, training and professional support should be available. But why is there no acknowledgement of the hundreds of thousands of claimants with mental health difficulties who cannot work, whether they want to or not?[4] Where is the evidence that people with mental health difficulties are actually benefiting from what is now two decades of workfare conditionality in the UK? Where is the evidence that in our current labour market decent jobs exist that will nourish people’s mental health? And where is the evidence that psychological therapy for benefit claimants with long-term mental health disabilities succeeds in supporting them into decent jobs they want, can survive and maintain?

When the professional bodies say, “an estimated 86-90% of people with mental health conditions that are not in employment want to work”, they are supporting the proposition that getting into work is an overwhelmingly important and efficacious goal for this group of benefit claimants. It is not clear where this figure comes from and what it means.

A similar figure is quoted by The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ report on Mental Health and Work (2013)[5], making use of a Sheffield study by J. Secker and others (2001)[6]. In fact, Secker finds that of their sample of 149 unemployed service users, when asked if they were interested in work of any kind – including voluntary and supported work – “around half (47%) responded positively, and almost the same proportion (43%) had a tentative interest. Only 15 people (10%) had no interest in work”. At the same time, only 25% of respondents saw full-time employment as a long-term goal. 71% said that their preferred vocational assistance would be “help for mental health/keep current service”.[7]

This study does not translate into “86-90% of people with mental health conditions that are not in employment want to work”.[8] What it points to is the complex texture of attitudes, desires and fears around waged work that are the common experience of service users, alongside the harsh realities of the current labour market, the socio-economic environment generally, and the dire state of mental health services of all kinds more particularly.[9]

From our point of view, the professional bodies’ statement is a step in the right direction. It is a step that must now be followed through with active political pressure on the DWP and the Dept of Health to suspend sanctions and set up an independent review of their use, including the damage they inflict on people’s mental health. Parliament has already called for such a review.[10]

But more than this, the remit of such a review should include all aspects of conditionality in a benefits system that deploy psycho-compulsion through mandatory rules or through the more subtle imposition of behavioural norms which aim to override the claimant’s voice.

We again suggest that the psy professional bodies would benefit by widening their own conversations to include service users and the rank and file of their membership. They would also win more credibility as organisations with ethical and social values independent of the government’s policies of dismantlement of social security and the welfare state if they were willing to make transparent their currently private conversations with DWP.

[1] Mental Wealth Alliance (MWA), formerly the Mental Wealth Foundation, is a broad, inclusive coalition of professional, grassroots, academic and survivor campaigns and movements. We bear collective witness and support collective action in response to the destructive impact of the new paradigm in health, social care, welfare and employment. We oppose the individualisation and medicalisation of the social, political and material causes of hardship and distress, which are increasing as a result of austerity cuts to services and welfare and the unjust shift of responsibility onto people on low incomes and welfare benefits. Our recent conference focused on Welfare Reforms and Mental Health, Resisting the Impact of Sanctions, Assessments and Psychological Coercion.

[2] Parliamentary committees, the national press, endless reports from charities, service user organisations, people with disabilities, claimants unions and workfare campaigners have been reporting the physical and psychological damage of ‘welfare reform’ and its tragic outcomes for a decade.

[3] On psycho-compulsion and the benefits system see Friedli and Stearn http://mh.bmj.com/content/41/1/40.full and https://vimeo.com/157125824

[4] In February 2015 over a million people claiming ESA under a MH diagnosis were in either the Support Group or WRAG. Over 70% of new applicants for ESA are found unfit for work

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/470545/3307-2015.pdf

[5] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/212266/hwwb-mental-health-and-work.pdf p.17

[6] Secker, J., Grove, B. & Seebohm, P. (2001) Challenging barriers to employment, training and education for mental health service users. The service users’ perspective. London: Institute for Applied Health & Social Policy, King’s College London.

[7] Ibid, pp. 397-399

[8] Compare a DWP survey of disabled working age benefit claimants in 2013. 56% of 1,349 respondents agreed that they wanted to work. Only 15% agreed that they were currently able to work. Only 23% agreed that having a job would be beneficial for their health. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/224543/ihr_16_v2.pdf

[9] For example, some of this complexity is flagged by Blank, Harries and Reynolds (2012) The meaning and experience of work in the context of severe and enduring mental health problems: An interpretative phenomenological analysis Work: 47 45(3) “Stigma, the disclosure of a mental health problem and the symptoms of the mental health problem are frequently described, as well as feelings of hopelessness, seeing recovery as uncertain, and feeling a lack of encouragement from services. Difficulties in accessing occupational health services, having a disjointed work history, lack of work experience, age, lack of motivation and fears about competency, as well as the social benefits system and caring commitments, are also experienced as barriers to accessing employment for people with mental health problems.”

[10] https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/work-and-pensions-committee/news/benefit-sanctions-report

Mental health activists, workfare campaigners and therapists protest against work cure therapy for benefit claimants with mental health disabilities

It’s time for the psy professional bodies to stop colluding with the DWP

Join the protest against the professional bodies supporting work cure therapy for benefit claimants with mental health disabilities

Tuesday 5th July at 9 am at the New Savoy Conference

Hallam Conference Centre, 44 Hallam Street, London W1W 6JJ

Central London @ Great Portland Street tube (Map here)

See the conference programme here

For a decade or more, the Government has been deploying psychotherapy to get people with mental health difficulties off benefits, back to work and mapped into the neoliberal labour market. Since 2010, austerity policies of welfare reform – punitive Work Capability Assessments, benefit cuts, workfare, sanctioning – have intensified government strategies of psycho-compulsion and work cure for welfare claimants. IAPT therapists are being co-located in Jobcentres, DWP mental health advisers and employment coaches in GP surgeries, food banks, schools and libraries.

The big five national organisations representing the professions of counselling, psychotherapy and clinical psychology* have welcomed these policies and the state funding of back-to-work therapy.

As members of the New Savoy Partnership, they have been major players in The New Savoy Conference, an annual jamboree and market stall for state therapies in the NHS. The NSC frequently stages opening addresses by DWP and Health ministers to assert the close relationship between the professional bodies, MH charities and Government mental health and work-cure policies and funding. Hundreds of mental health workers accredited by the psy professional bodies have been hired by the DWP to provide “support into work”. These are jobs that are experienced as deeply unethical by many of the professionals being steered into this kind of work.

In March this year, the Mental Wealth Foundation (see below) wrote to the five professional organisations challenging their support of the government’s use of psychological therapies to put pressure on people with mental health disabilities to get into work. You can read the exchange of letters between us and the professional bodies here.

So far, all but one of these organisations are refusing to speak to us and continue to argue that they have had private reassurances from the DWP that “work cure” therapy will not be mandatory for claimants, and will not involve setting entry into employment as a therapeutic outcome. This claim defies the reality of the DWP’s record of punitive and coercive policies of workfare, Work Capability Assessment and sanctioning and its growing determination through its Work and Health initiatives to prioritise work as the therapy of choice for long-term mental health disability.

* British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies; British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy; British Psychoanalytic Council; British Psychological Society; United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy

Come and join the protest against work cure therapy for benefit claimants with mental health disabilities. All welcome. Gather at 9am on Tuesday 5th July outside the Hallam Conference Centre, 44 Hallam Street, London W1W 6JJ. For more info contact eventsatfpn@yahoo.com

The Mental Wealth Foundation (MWF) is a broad, inclusive coalition of professional, grassroots, academic and survivor campaigns and movements. We bear collective witness and support collective action in response to the destructive impact of the new paradigm in health, social care, welfare and employment. We oppose the individualisation and medicalisation of the social, political and material causes of hardship and distress, which are increasing as a result of austerity cuts to services and welfare and the unjust shift of responsibility onto people on low incomes and welfare benefits. Our recent conference focused on Welfare Reforms and Mental Health, Resisting the Impact of Sanctions, Assessments and Psychological Coercion.

Currently, seventeen organisations are gathered under the MWF umbrella: Mental Health Resistance Network; Disabled People Against Cuts; Recovery in the Bin; Boycott Workfare; The Survivors Trust; Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy; College of Psychoanalysts; Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility; Psychologists Against Austerity; Free Psychotherapy Network; Psychotherapists and Counsellors Union; Critical Mental Health Nurses’ Network; Social Work Action Network (Mental Health Charter); National Unemployed Workers Combine; Merseyside County Association of Trades Union Councils; Scottish Unemployed Workers’ Network; National Health Action Party

Manchester Conference Saturday 21st May 2016

Mind the Gap: Free Psychotherapy in an Unjust World

Sat, May 21, 2016 at 11:00 AM

Friends Meeting House, – 6 Mount St, , Manchester M2 5NS, United Kingdom – View Map

A conference organised by the Free Psychotherapy Network

The state of our emotional and psychological lives is as fundamental as our material standard of living – our incomes, our physical health, our working conditions, our education and housing. Yet we live in a society whose dominant political and cultural messages over-emphasize money, profit, property and consumption. At the same time, the quality of our emotional lives and relationships with our families, friends, co-workers, neighbours and wider communities is undervalued.

This conference is an opportunity to explore and develop sustainable networks of psychological support which are community led. The aim is to create a collaborative space for therapists, service users, survivors, claimants’ unions and community groups to explore our experience, our needs and desires together. We have much to learn from each other!

The day will be workshop based. Workshop themes may include: sick individual or sick society?; peer led groups – what works, what doesn’t; the experience of FPN so far – free work and working free of funding and institutional restraints; minding the gap between the ‘professional’ and the ‘client’ – exploring the power relationship between therapists and clients; building the relationship between FPN and community groups; developing FPN local groups.

If you would like to suggest or run a workshop, please email: eventsatfpn@yahoo.com – add your suggestions here

The conference is free. All welcome.

If you would like help with travel costs we may be able to help, email: paulwilliamatkinson@gmail.com

The venue is wheelchair accessible.

Book a free place via Eventbrite here

Recovery In The Bin

This User Led group is for MH survivors and supporters who are fed up with the way colonised ‘recovery’ is being used to discipline and control those who are trying to find a place in the world, to live as they wish, trying to deal with the very real mental distress they encounter on a daily basis.

Recovery In The Bin 18 Key Principles, agreed and adopted by group members on 6th February 2015.

• We oppose the ways in which the concept of ‘recovery’ has been colonised by mental health services, commissioners and policy makers.

• We believe the growing development of this form of the ‘Recovery Model’ is a symptom of neoliberalism, and capitalism is the crisis! Many of us will never be able to ‘recover’ living under these intolerable social and economic conditions, due to the effects of social and economic circumstances such as poor housing, poverty, stigma, racism, sexism, unreasonable work expectations, and countless other barriers.

• We believe “UnRecovered” is a valid and legitimate self-definition, and we emphasise its political and social contrast to “Recovered”. This doesn’t mean we want to remain ‘unwell’ or ‘ill’, but that we reject the new neoliberal intrusion on the word ‘recovery’ that has been redefined, and taken over by market forces, humiliating treatment techniques and atomising outcome measurements.

• We are critical of tools such as “Recovery Stars” as a means of measuring ‘progress’ as they represent a narrow & judgemental view of wellness and self-definition . We do not believe outcome measures are a helpful way to steer policy, techniques or services towards helping people cope with mental distress.

• We believe that mental health services are using ‘recovery’ ideology to mask greater coercion. For example, the claim that Community Treatment Orders are imposed as a “step towards recovery”.

• We demand that no one is put under unnecessary pressure or unreasonable expectations to ‘recover’ by mental health services. For example, being discharged too soon or being pushed into inappropriate employment.

• We object to therapeutic techniques like ‘mindfulness’ and “positive thinking” being used to pacify patients and stifle collective dissent.

• We propose to spread awareness of how neoliberalism and market forces shape the way mental health ‘recovery’ is planned and delivered by services, including those within the voluntary sector.
• We want a robust ‘Social Model of Madness’, from the left of politics, placing mental health within the context of the wider class struggle. We know from experience and evidence that capitalism and social inequality can be bad for your mental health!

• We demand an immediate halt to the erosion of the welfare state, an end to benefits cuts, delays and sanctions, and the abolishment of ‘Work Capability Assessments’ & ‘Workfare’, which are both unfit for purpose. As a consequence of austerity, people are killing themselves, and policy-makers must be held to account.

• We want genuine non-medicalised alternatives, like Open Dialogue and Soteria type houses to be given far greater credence, and sufficient funding, in order to be planned & delivered effectively. (No half measures, redistribution of resources from traditional MH services if necessary).

• We demand the immediate fair redistribution of the country’s wealth, and that all capital for military/nuclear purposes is redirected to progressive User-Led Community/Social Care mental health services.

• We need a broader range of Survivor narratives to be recognised, honoured, respected and promoted that include an understanding of the difficulties and struggles that people face every day when unable to‘recover’, not just ‘successful recovery’ type stories.

• We oppose how ‘Peer Support Workers’ are now expected to have acceptable ‘recovery stories’ that entail gratuitous self-exploration, and versions of ‘successful recovery’ fulfilling expectations, yet no such job requirements are expected of other workers in the mental health sector.

• We refuse to feel compelled to tell our ‘stories’, in order to be validated, whether as Peer Support Workers, Activists, Campaigners and/orAcademics. We believe being made to feel like you have to tell your ‘story’ to justify your experience is a form of disempowerment, under the guise of empowerment.

• We are opposed to “Recovery Colleges” and their establishment, as a cheap alternative to more effective services. Their course contents fall short of being ‘evidence based’, and fail to lead to academic accreditation, recognised by employers.

• We believe that there are core principles of ‘recovery’ that are worth saving, and that the colonisation of ‘recovery’ undermines those principles, which have hitherto championed autonomy and self-determination. These principles cannot be found in a one size fits all technique, or calibrated by an outcome measure. We also believe that autonomy and self-determination, as we are social beings, can only be attained through collective struggle rather than through individualistic striving and aspiration.

• We demand that an independent enquiry is commissioned into the so-called ‘Recovery Model’ and associated ideology that it stems from.

We call for our fellow mental health Survivors and allies to adopt our principles, and join us in campaigning against this new ‘recovery’ ideology by non-violent protest. We know our views about ‘recovery’ will be controversial, and used by supporters of the ideologies behind ‘recovery’ colonisation to try to divide us. However, we seek to balance the protection of existing services valued by Survivors with agitation for fundamental change.

Join us at Recovery In The Bin Facebook Group.

Middle Class Solutions To Working Class Problems Is Why Charities Like MIND Keep Getting It So Wrong

Originally posted by johnny void 13th February 2015

Iain Duncan Smith must be pissing himself. A report released at the end of last year by mental health charity MIND could not have gone further in endorsing the core ideas that lie behind his bungled and brutal welfare reforms.

The report is titled “We’ve Got Work To Do” and claims to demand ‘fundamental reform’ of the workplace and social security system to better support people with a mental health condition. Sadly it is calling for nothing of the sort and is underpinned by the exact same lies and toxic assumptions that have driven both Tory and Labour welfare reforms.

Just like the DWP, MIND have adopted the flawed medical consensus that work is good for your health. The charity does acknowledge that this isn’t actually always true, but falls short of saying that work can be bad for your health, instead arguing that “inappropriate or poor quality work can have as negative an effect on people’s mental health as not being in work”. They base this opinion on research carried out in Australia that found that “the mental health of those who were unemployed was comparable or more often superior to those in jobs of the poorest psychosocial quality.” In other words work can be worse for your mental health than being unemployed, rather than just equally bad as MIND claim.

It is not nit-picking to point out the discrepency between what this research found and what MIND say it found because it reveals the charity’s opinions to be based on ideology, not facts. This same factual slippage occurs elsewhere in the report when MIND begin by saying that most people with mental health conditions want to work, which later becomes everyone with a mental health condition wants to work. The truth, as revealed in the footnotes to the report, are that only around 58% of people out of work due to a mental health condition strongly agreed they wanted to return to work whilst 20% did not feel they were well enough.

These two distortions – or let’s call them lies – have allowed the despised Work Capability Assessment, benefit sanctions and workfare all to be misrepresented as ‘support’ or ‘help’. In truth these measures destroy lives. The medical consensus that work is good for you does often not apply to those on the lower end of the income scale who face being forced by Jobcentres into the kind of work likely to make them ill.

MIND’s Chief Executive Paul Farmer claims at the beginning of the report that there have been “improvements in how people with mental health problems are supported”, although it is unclear what they are. There then follows an emotive story about someone’s journey through the benefit system after leaving work due to depression. This is actually where their journey would stop, because unless they could provide reems of medical evidence to the Jobcentre they would be disallowed benefits for giving up work. That this reports begins by misrepresenting the benefit system as it currently functions just shows how removed these giant disability charities have become from the lives of those they claim to support.

Instead the ‘fundamental reform’ they call for is actually more of the same or worse – such as the dangerous idea that sensitive health information from the Work Capability Assessment should be passed over to Work Programme providers like A4e and G4S. This is like your boss having access to your medical history and appallingly MIND seem pretty relaxed about this as well.

Much of the early part of the report is taken up by calling for improvements in the working environment for people suffering mental ill-health. Which is fine, everyone wants that, except greedy employers who worry it might cost them money or who harbour nasty little prejudices about mental health. According to MIND themselves this is about 40% of them. Yet one of MIND’s recommendations is that the Maximus run ‘Fit To Work’ service – the new telephone helpline which will be used to certify time off instead of GPs – should more effectively engage with employers. About the only decent thing about Fit To Work, which is designed to bully people back into the workplace before they are better, is that currently you have the right to keep your boss out of any discussions.

The final part of the report discusses what future welfare-to-work schemes should look like for those with a mental health condition. The charity are calling for “new specialist scheme for people with mental health problems on
ESA”. A scheme which should be run by those who “have expertise and experience of working with people with mental health problems”. And here lies the real reason for this report. It’s a fucking advert to any incoming Labour Government to give MIND a lucrative contract to run a new welfare-to-work service.

There is no longer any doubt that endless Atos assessments, workfare and benefit sanctions are creating a crisis in the lives of those with a mental health condition. The tragic death toll rises ever higher. Yet nowhere in this report does MIND call for these brutal policies to be scrapped. Even if MIND were handed a contract to be nicer to people on ESA this would still leave those who have been found fit for work abandoned and dumped onto mainstream unemployment benefits alongside those whose condition is at yet undiagnosed. On twitter yesterday MIND claimed they couldn’t call for sanctions to be scrapped for people who are unemployed because it wasn’t a key issue. If your mental health condition isn’t bad enough to be able to claim ESA then tough shit seems to be the charity’s response if you get sanctioned.

The thing is, naked profiteering aside, MIND are not bastards. They have dedicated front line workers who don’t get paid anywhere near enough and are sincere committed people. Workers who would probably agree that benefit sanctions and the Work Capability Assessment should be scrapped immediately. They see the carnage that is being caused everyday.

The problem is that reports like these are overseen and commissioned by highly paid charity executives who live lifestyles that their service users and lowest paid staff can only dream of. These lifestyles lead them to make assumptions based on their own distorted experience of the world. Over time they become unable to avoid inflicting solutions to the problems faced by working class people based on their own middle class values because that is all they know. Often these solutions are utterly bizarre, like the boss of homelessness charity Thamesreach Jeremy Swain’s obsessive belief that the biggest problem facing homeless people is that beer is too cheap. You read that right. Too cheap.

It is near impossible for someone on a huge salary who does a job they love to understand why someone may not feel up to working at present. That, to someone like MIND Chief Executive Paul Farmer, really does seem like madness. Likewise charity bosses have no real understanding of why it might be dangerous to allow other bosses to snoop around your health records. Bosses think bosses are lovely people who would never abuse their powers – or at least not without a damn good reason. And bosses know best, they tell each other that all the time.

Charity bosses in particular have their own view of themselves as benevolent experts confirmed everyday by politicians and journalists who would far rather talk to them than someone on the dole. Their whopping salaries provide further proof of their own ability. As do arse-licking middle managers who continually tell them how wonderful and clever they are, to their faces at least. So Paul Farmer must be is right because he’s Paul Farmer and MIND are right because they are MIND and anyone criticising them just doesn’t understand. Because they are not experts.

That’s how MIND alongside other disability and anti-poverty charities can so easily dismiss the demands of grassroots campaigns comprising of disabled people and benefit claimants. Groups which are more or less united in calling for benefit sanctions and the WCA to be scrapped completely. These people are not experts. At worst they might even be service users. And you don’t want them getting too uppity. Before you know where you are you’ll have working class people running organisations together to address working class problems. Then there’d be nothing at all for poor Paul Farmer to do. He might even have to get a real job.

Please sign/share/tweet the petition Benefit Sanctions Must Be Stopped Without Exceptions.

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There it is – poem by Jayne Cortez

THERE IT IS

And if we don’t fight

if we don’t resist

if we don’t organize and unify and

get the power to control our own lives

Then we will wear

the exaggerated look of captivity

the stylized look of submission

the bizarre look of suicide

the dehumanized look of fear

and the decomposed look of repression

forever and ever and ever

And there it is

(1982)