Relative receiving benefits although able to work

[Radiator23]

Hi, I hope someone can help with a crisis of conscience and also practical advice.

A relative receives benefits and lives in a council flat (just her) in a village near my family and does not work. About 25 years ago she had mental health problems and was very ill. Since then she has had all the help the NHS and DWP have to offer and for several years (I’d say about 10) has certainly been well enough to do some work, even part time in a shop or something.

She does no volunteering, gets subsidised travel, arts and music classes, gym membership, has some sort of support worker to show her life skills (although she can manage perfectly well, she is 45 and in excellent physical health).

She can drive but chooses not to, and is constantly asking other family members to give her lifts, take her to family events, generally go out of our way, as well as also being unwilling to solve her own minor home problems, eg. calling a repairman, connecting TV to broadband. She joins her parents on holiday several times a year - they pay for everything.

She has quite a nice life really (sorry this is probably sounding a bit bitter). Other adult family members have had their own health problems over the years but still worked when able. My view is you pay into the system when you can and take when you really need to. Everyone is getting a bit fed up with this person but no-one will say anything to her. It makes family get-togethers very awkward.

I keep reading about how awful those work assessments are and wonder how on earth she can still be receiving benefits when people who are physically disabled and suffering life limiting illnesses are being told they are fit for work. However I have no direct experience of the system so perhaps there is something I don’t understand.

Any advice on either dealing with this, approaching the relevant agency, or tackling it with her, or just learning not to care would be really helpful. I don’t think this counts as benefit fraud, but I have seen her play up the severity of her situation when questioned on it by others so I would not put it past her to do the same with external organisations. I think she does it to defend her lifestyle but cannot see that doing some work would help her as well as be the right thing to do by society.

You do know that disability fraud is about 0.5% of all cases?
Its actually very hard to get benefits when you are ill. My DH is disabled and has been for 13 yrs. The amount of time he was challenged by people parking in a disabled space because he was young and didn't look "ill" was incredible.
Unless you are a medically trained professional, butt out!

Do you really think it’s that easy to get disability benefits op. Hell my dh can’t even wipe his own bum right now but we get diddily squat bar a blue badge.
Yabu

You may be right in some circumstances and with some health issues but not where someone has been assessed as needing a support worker and the level of input stated in OP's post.

My relative was desperate to get back to work after their first Psychotic breakdown and were really helped by their employer allowing them to do a phased return to work. However on week 5 they relapsed. Another year or so off work followed by another breakdown after another 5 weeks at work.

Most people would not recognise my family member is ill. Even some family think they are just idle. They were even discharged by the MH team once and that was just before the 2nd psychotic breakdown.

It seems to me that if you are above average intelligence, articulate and well spoken and can raise an occasional smile, others seem to find it hard to accept you may have severe MH issues. This just goes to show there is still stereotyping over what kind of people have MH issues. It can affect anyone. There but for the grace if God go I.

Your life must be truly awful if you're jealous of a person with mental health issues.

Well said TheQueef.

Benefit fraud is dwarfed by tax avoidance and evasion by the rich.

Your relative sounds like one of my friends. I hope it isn't her. She has such a struggle with her mental health, and has a support worker, and goes to various art and therapy classes. She is really unwell a lot of the time but someone who doesn't know her may think she is fiddling the system somehow.

Is this really how people view me? I have physical illnesses and mental health problems, the MH issues were made a billion times worse with pip assessments, yes I get pip, being chronically unwell is a fucking expensive business!

I'm now going to imagine my neighbours gossiping about my lovely lifestyle of staying home every day, rarely going out and NEVER going out socialising in the evening. And of course I'm living it up with my pip payments and my autistic son's dla payments, living the life of fucking Riley here... Of course they can't see inside my home, the pain of trying to get up the stairs, on and off the loo etc. They can't see the crippling anxiety of trying to get myself to leave the house, if they look through my window they will see me watching tv most days, I can be very apathetic about things if I'm ina bad place mentally that day, so I stare at the tv. And I don't drive either because I wouldn't want to be responsible for injuring someone.

Thanks Op and those that have agreed with them. Thanks for making me and all the others feel like utter shit. Keep your jealous beak out, I'll let you live a week of my life if you want completely free of charge so you can get a feel for your relatives wonderful lifestyle

And I volunteer to help people filling in PIP forms. I do everything in my power to help them get what they need so put that in yer pipe OP.

So far I’ve done four forms, three have been successful and one is still waiting to hear.

Living with disability is shit...especially if that disability is invisible. I do what I can to ensure those people are heard.

I don't look ill. On appearance I don't look mentally ill either. However, day in day out I am living a massive struggle. (I wrote a day in the life blog post and that even for me was a massive eye opener.)

It's an achievement if I can get out of bed in the morning and remember to have breakfast. If i am going out somewhere it has to be planned in advance. My memory is appalling.

I began a couple of hours volunteering, I was great worker but then had to quit as I was massively struggling.

You sound judgy OP.

advanced try and take comfort from the fact that on a thread of over 100 messages, less than 5 posters have agreed with op. The rest of us think those people are stupid xxx

Agree with the previous posters commenting about knowing the difference between ESA and PIP/DLA. I was working part time up until 20 years ago,but had to give up as my health problems got so bad. I was claiming DLA at the time (now PIP) and I can remember a so called 'friend ' of mine,on finding out that I was receiving DLA (at the lowest possible rate at that time) that I was 'fraudulently claiming' because I was working! I told her to go ahead and report me,because it was perfectly legal to claim DLA whilst working.

The difficulty here is not knowing the situation with certainty:

• You can't know 100% if you're right about her being capable of doing a job now (you may be right, but then again you may not).

But of course those flaming you know even less*, and are not really in any position to judge either you or her. Ignore them.

Fundamentally, sometimes it is just really hard to distinguish between people with genuine problems and people who have ended up in a position where it is overwhelmingly in their interests to take the piss.

Shame, but not your problem to solve.

They do not give support workers unless someone has a serious condition and under care of mental health team. They do discharge people, mostly. This is one of the things PIP do take into consideration, as well. So it seems likely the person in question would also be on quite serious medication- possibly antipsychotics as well as antidepressants to manage things.

Have to agree with PP who say its bloody hard to get PIP.

My mum, who's been a nurse most of her adult life, at 59 was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. She was advised to apply for PIP. She did and got turned down

Can you imagine how much harder it is with mental health issues to get awarded PIP. Chances are you dont know the half of it.

YABU

I do PIP forms for people with mental health problems . It may be autism, it may be some kind of personality disorder. Sometimes they have physical health issues too and in one case learning difficulties.

I sit down and we look at everything then I spend a couple of hours completing the form with them.

I always declare that I have completed the form along with the name of the charity I volunteer for and the DWP can also phone me if needed to clarify anything.

I think the OP got a heavy flaming but to be fair it must be hard from the outside looking in . My DH has plenty to say about a friend of mine who gets PIP ...she also gets ESA and everything else. He thinks she has a great life. She doesn’t....she’s in almost constant pain, she has severe mental health problems and takes a load of medication daily for this. She has terrible post traumatic stress having been abused in the way no child should be when she was little. Society let her down massively as a child, as an adult she is still dealing with all that. I wouldn’t wish her life on my worst enemy..no matter how good it may look from the outside,

I don't think you are being unreasonable. Reaching the comments on here you'd think no-one ever played the system. My sister had trap discectomies, she was unable to work so claimed. Fair enough, that's what it's there for. She still claims as she is unable to work, but able to wear heels, all without a limp, stand and sit without difficulty and paint and garden for my parents. Still can't work and still claims. I cannot be a100%, but I am 99% sure. She moves better I do...

I do PIP forms for people with mental health problems . It may be autism, it may be some kind of personality disorder

Autism isn't a mental health problem.

I think the OP got a heavy flaming but to be fair it must be hard from the outside looking in.

Well then maybe people should stop making assumptions based on the very few facts they have, and just accept that, no, they don't know what's going in a person's life?
What is it about people and disability benefits? If there's one thing I really hate about being disabled (and there's a lot of things I hate) it's the way in which other people treat you as a sort of public property.

Like they think because "their taxes" are paying for our benefits that it entitles them to know everything about our lives, for them to be able to judge if we "look or seem disabled enough" for them to deem us worthy of recieving disability benefits (funny I could have sworn that was the DWP's job, yet it's something the general public seem to have taken upon themselves) and even worse for them to decide what we are and aren't allowed to do with the pittance the government provides.

I think of the reasons the OP got such a heavy flaming is because she claims to be related to the person she's bitching about, when you have snakes like her in your own family, well it certainly puts a person off the idea of making friends or trusting anyone at all, even when they're part of your family.

Being autistic myself I would agree its not a mental health problem but it's still seen as that by many people although campaigns will change that virew more and more.

Really, I would have thought most people at least understand that by now.
But if you don't think it's a mental health problem (and you're autistic yourself) then it's confusing why you would list it as one. People thinking it's a mental health problem is hardly going to change if you've got autistic people listing it as one.

Everyone here claiming they know someone cheating the system, you've no idea how hard it is to claim benefits in the first place, how many hoops you have to jump through to get them, how tough the assessments are. There are a lot of people out there who don't receive benefits they're entitled to because they failed the very difficult assessments, so you can be sure if they're receiving benefits they're actually disabled enough to be entitled, be it physically or mentally.

Sorry but most people DO NOT understand that and being autistic myself trust me when I say I DO KNOW.

Wind yer neck in dearie. Just a suggestion

Fucking people piss me off sometimes.

Presumably if OP reports for fraud the relatives benefits would be stopped & they'll need to rely on family support even more.

People tend to put a mask on to portray image they want to be seen & cope best they can in order to fit in (even when the cost of doing so to themselves can be high). If try to talk about more difficult aspects, can be seen as being negative/miserable & folk don't want to hear it.
I don't think we can ever really know what's going on in other's lives, even those living together can be oblivious/lack understanding.

The poor woman's MH problems were probably caused by the fact that her entire family are vicious, wilfully ignorant bullies.

@batsypasty not in my experience. Speak as you find. My sister can paint ceilings and walls and bend to garden, but is in too much pain to work? Don't buy it. She may need to take pain-killers and grit her teeth like millions of us, but she is capable of work. How she manages to play it I've no idea, because like you, I know of plenty of people that really need it and are denied. That doesnt mean no-one can defraud it though.

@Batsypatsy sorry, wrong name in previous post.