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Streeting Attacks Mental Health And Disability
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Says Mental Health Over-diagnosed, disabled needlessly on benefits Speaking on Sunday 16th March, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, made it clear that those suffering from mental health illness are over-diagnosed, and that the disabled can work rather than being on benefits. In doing so, he did not offer to tackle the majority of employers who fail to give jobs to anyone clearly suffering from mental health issues, do not make reasonable workplace adjustments for them to remain in work; and are happy just to manage them out of the businesses using HR tactics to pressurise them into leaving work voluntarily; or to use sickness policies which are draconian; in order to dismiss them as being unfit for the job. As for those who are disabled, he implied that most can work but just prefer not to. His 'Tory principled' phrase: "helping them into work" is simply forked tongue phrasing of the fact that like the Tories before them, Labour's policies towards the disabled, both physical and mental; is basically ordering them to work under the penalty of losing benefits if they don't. IN BOTH CASES, STREETING AND STARMER, REFUSE TO ADDRESS THE REAL REASONS WHY SO MANY DISABLED PEOPLE ARE NOT IN WORK.
“Applying for benefits is not an easy process. People with a mental health problem must go through a lengthy and arduous assessment process, with decisions to not award support often overturned at appeal stage. We must also be extremely careful with the language around mental health diagnoses, which risks creating a climate of stigmatising people’s real experiences and undermining the opinions of medical professionals.” Commenting also in the same new article, Robert Howard, a professor of old age psychiatry at University College London, said: “I’m really anxious that the kind of language that Wes Streeting was using this morning will be used to justify further disinvestment in mental health services. “If we want to get people with mental illness back to work, the way to do that is to make sure they can access timely and effective treatment, and pretending that they haven’t got a real illness, it just doesn’t make me feel encouraged that the government will invest sufficiently in mental health services to help people get back. “There’s so many young people with kind of chronic generalised anxiety who can’t work. The way to get them back to work isn’t to kind of shame them and punish them and tell them they’re not ill. The way to get them back to work is to make sure that they have access to proper psychological therapy and treatment so they can be fit and go back to work.” As per usual, politicians of all parties stigmatise and blame those with disabilities, both physical and mental, accuse them of not wanting to work; and ignoring the true reasons why so many people with ill-health are not in work. They also fail to address the causes of ill-health, both in society and through work, and refuse to put in remediation policies with employers to address the 'hidden' bias against disabled employees. Sanction the Employers who keep the disabled out of work, not the victims of their abuse and inadequate employment policies and work-place support. Source: The Guardian See also: Streeting's Plans For HI-Tec To Replace Human Interaction In Mental Healthcare Costs Lives The E-Library for support documentation here and Signpost Help Services
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Speaking to The Guardian newspaper, Minesh Patel, the associate director of policy and campaigns at the charity Mind, responded to Streeting saying: