In this blog I’ve taken a slight departure from responding to other people’s unanswered questions to responding to some news that seems to have passed many people by this week.
If I sound angry in this blog, it’s because I am and I make no apology for this.
Last week an academic paper was published examining mental ill-health in working age benefit claimants in the UK. The research explored the impact of benefit conditionality on mental health, looking at how the requirements and threat of sanctions and loss of benefits impacted claimants. The key findings that stood out to me were the statistics that 43% of benefit claimants in the UK had thoughts of self-harm in the last fortnight and that rates of depression amongst claimants are twice that of the general population.
Evidence Based Policy?
This paper was published in the same week that the UK government yet again ramped up their demonisation of disabled people, announcing wide-ranging plans to significantly reduce in and out-of-work benefit support for disabled people. The rhetoric accompanying these announcements has been one that will be familiar to many people in the UK – of people who are simply reporting symptoms of depression to their GP and then able to live a life of luxury on state benefits with no questions asked.
As someone who has had to claim out-of-work state benefits, I can confirm, as can many, many others, none of that is true. The level of incapacity, the amount of medical evidence you must wring out of a barely functioning heath system and the hoops you have to jump to be awarded a pittance that just about enables you to survive, are beyond most people’s comprehension.
On release of the academic paper, lead author Professor Ben Baumberg Geiger said, “There is an ongoing narrative that many people receiving benefits do not really have mental health problems. Our study shows that their levels of mental distress are extremely high.”
In summing up the research, a Kings College London blog on the paper concludes, “It challenges the narrative that most claimants are not mentally distressed, and that high levels of mental health-related claims are due to gaming the system.”
But this research, although widely discussed in disability and mental health activist circles, seems to have had very little impact on government messaging. Even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, they are ploughing on.
Deserving and Undeserving Disability?
There are many people who have written far more eloquently than me about the impacts of reducing benefits; about the huge impact of this tortuous playing out of policy in public on disabled people – their lives and survival being used a political football and I don’t want to purely repeat their very clear and compelling points here.
What I do want to examine is the relationship and commonalities between attitudes to disabled people and attitudes to self-harm. And why, even when the two meet in shocking headlines, somehow, it’s still easy for many people to turn away.
Is self-harm diagnostic of illness if it’s as a direct result of government policy? Using self-harm as a diagnostic indicator in this situation isn’t practicing medicine, it’s collusion with the state that has shades of ‘homosexuality is a mental illness’ and if we go further back, drapetomania, the apparent mental affliction that caused slaves to want to escape. I don’t make these comparisons lightly or glibly, but with full recognition of the impact and import these previous diagnoses had on social attitudes, the immense suffering they caused and the immoral actions they made possible.
I make these comparisons while reading about policies and practices which seem to have the clear intention of further demonising disabled people while simultaneously driving them into poverty and despair. Civil rights might have brought us so far, but it’s clear that the notion of deserving and undeserving poor so entrenched in UK society is still alive and well today. Why is it so easy to turn public wrath on disabled people? Is it because of all the groups who have campaigned for civil rights, it’s the one that could at any point affect any of us? Is it easier to other and imply that disabled people who aren’t able to work are just ‘faking it’ than face the idea that one day that might be you?
Safety in Distance
It’s actually very reflective of the way many people who self-harm for any reason are responded to, as if the easiest way to respond is to very firmly locate people who self-harm in the category of ‘other’, whose main problems are that they’re ‘not very good at coping’. The contrast there is ‘I would never be that person, because I’m strong and a coper’. In the same way it’s easy to ‘other’ disabled people with the idea that ‘if that happened to me, I’d just get on with it’, because the idea that there might actually be things in life that are intolerable, or impossible to cope with or derail your whole life is too scary to contemplate.
The other common rhetoric that comes up is ‘I don’t mean YOU – just those other people’; those other people who are self-harming for attention or because they have ‘poor coping skills’; those other people who are disabled that are ‘playing the system’.
Make no mistake, you are talking about me when you say that.
As someone who has been disabled by mental illness for many years, and has used self-harm, I am no different from the many other people I have met in my personal and professional lives who have faced the same issues.
In fact, it’s the experiences and allyship and activism of all of those people who have gone before me that has made it possible to see my value as a disabled person, that there are valid reasons for my distress, and that being labelled and categorised by health and benefits systems isn’t the only way of understanding my experiences. I am incredibly lucky. I have spent time on benefits, and been judged for it, and then I have been able to get to a place where I can work. I am able to work more or less on my own terms, but my world has become small in order to make that possible. I’m sure on paper that could be described as a success story, but that just underlines this intrinsic idea that people’s only value is in productivity, being able to work, not needing others.
The Spectre of Dependency
Something that gets thrown at a lot of people who self-harm, is that mental health services don’t want them to become ‘dependent’ and there is frequent use of the phrase ‘the patient needs to take responsibility’, whatever that means. Apparently, this is a huge and significant risk which strangely doesn’t appear to be shared by other areas of the health service. When I was pregnant, maternity services were very keen for me to be reviewed every two weeks, whilst managing not to panic that I would become dependent and require to meet a midwife fortnightly for the rest of my life. Nowhere was this dichotomy more apparent than when I developed pregnancy complications, and when my midwife contacted my GP on my behalf about a prescription, mental health services warned her not to do this as it would ‘encourage dependency’. I can tell you now that I am not, nine years later, still getting the midwife to sort prescriptions for me. What it did do was make me feel cared for and about, which enabled me to reach out for support that I needed.
Similarly, the messaging from the UK government is very heavily leaning on the concept of dependency, and the idea of state support as a crutch that disabled people are all too ready to lean into and need to be weaned off for their own good. Inherent in this messaging is an undercurrent of laziness and incompetence – as if disabled people are just looking for an ‘out’ and need to be forced to take responsibility for their own lives. Obviously, managing day-to-day life with a disability or long-term health condition and all the limitations and barriers that brings, does not allow us incompetent disabled people to develop any life skills, so we must be forced to for our own good.
Does Anyone Care?
This is all a very roundabout way of saying that there are many parallels between responses to self-harm and the current rhetoric around disability benefits in the UK, and similar attitudes and belief systems underpin both responses. That’s why I’m sad, but not in any way surprised that the news that incredibly high rates of people relying on state benefits have considered self-harm or self-harmed, has barely been a blip in the news headlines. It should be a horrifying, shocking statistic, but the conflation of both ‘disabled people are gaming the system’ and ‘people who self-harm are manipulating others’ have combined into a sort of supernova of ‘they need to be taught a lesson for their own good’ responses. And these responses of ignoring distress, ignoring the impact of disability and ignoring the costs of being disabled will have catastrophic consequences.
It’s not OK to let this just pass as another headline. Mental health services are overwhelmed as it is. Self-harm does not guarantee any kind of mental health support, and it’s verging on negligent in our current system to assume that referring someone on to a mental health service due to self-harm will result in any additional support. As a supposedly developed nation who cares about the vulnerable (as we apparently do when cute and heart-string tugging disability inspo-porn is shown to us in national ‘help the poor disabled people’ fundraising events), when we are presented with clear evidence that government policy is driving people to self-harm, if we do nothing, then I’m not sure we are worthy of being called a society. If we think it’s OK to do nothing because disabled people and people who self-harm are ‘not like us’ and so matters less, then which vulnerable groups will we watch being demonised next? That sounds like a slippery slope to me and without invoking Godwin’s law, I think you can see where I’m going.
So, please, do something.
If you’re in the UK – write to your MP, write to your local councillors – make it clear this is a policy that will affect how you vote.
Support activist groups like NSUN and DPAC who are taking the fight directly to parliament.
Challenge the rhetoric in everyday life – not speaking up against this type of rhetoric implies you might agree with it.
I can’t make any promises, but I’m holding on to the idea that solidarity is our only hope, and as Margaret Mead said:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
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