To be really cross about the proposed cuts?

[Byjimminy]

And feel really effing sorry for those with genuine anxiety and depression - it is disabling!

Already seeing threads in MH with people despairing in anticipation of cuts. As if mental health services haven't already been decimated beyond recognition already. GP appointments as rare as hen's teeth, CAMHS and access to decent therapy is next to non-existent, the conservatiives slashed all the support workers and sure start centres and we've had the worst pandemic in decades (centuries?) - long covid is thing too! And now people are just self diagnosing/making up mental health issues? How the hell anyone believes anyone manages to claim PIP without a proper diagnosis is insanity itself.

I completely agree with this article: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/wes-streeting-overdiagnosis-mental-health-adhd-b2716618.html

I know there will be umpteen threads on this already, but maybe some others like me just want to let stuff out in frustration and have a fresh place to say it. To think this is a labour government making these decisions BEFORE putting the services in place to actually help and treat people is beyond comprehension.

Then perhaps this is an area of social media that needs to be monitored more closely. Though why someone would willingly choose to live with the stigma of a MH condition and rely on a fragile benefits system in this day and age is beyond me.

@Byjimminy , I’m not convinced there is a stigma attached to mental illness these days. I would like to think not. The reasons people would choose a life of dependency should be explored and addressed.

I completely agree with all of this!

I had debilitating anxiety when I was younger. I was on the verge of losing my job as I would have really intense panic attacks triggered by a wide range of things, including being inside in slightly crowded places. People got sick of me constantly running outside to calm down. I had my own place and not working wasn’t an option.
So, back in a time when people knew little about anxiety disorders, I decided to ‘face my fear’ and got a job working behind a bar on Friday and Saturday nights. I’m not going to lie, it was fucking horrendous to begin with but eventually it worked and I haven’t had a panics attack since.
Although I have had diagnosed depression and anxiety since, I have never been signed off work for it.

I have to confess my sympathy for people with depression and anxiety is wearing very thin. My view is probably coloured by living for years with somebody who weaponised mental health and suicide threats to manipulate/control others and get what they wanted.

Also experienced this. It can be very, very manipulating.

Completely agree.
I remember a threat on here years ago about a kid terrified of dogs. One day the kids teacher had her dog in class with her, dog was tied to desk and quiet the whole time. Kid was terrified but managed to remain calm and get on with his work. Parent went bolistic when she was told about the dog and demanding answers from the school and that this never happened again. Almost all posters backed her up saying how awful this was. I would have taken the very opposite view, praised my child to the roof for coping and asked the teacher to please bring the dog every day.

I had debilitating anxiety when I was younger. I was on the verge of losing my job as I would have really intense panic attacks triggered by a wide range of things
My son is the same as many of his young adult friends. He is extremely introverted and was always an anxious child. As a young teenager, he would run all the way back home in the morning of he wasn't certain he had switched off his plugs.

When I insisted he needed to get a job after his GCSEs, he made it clear he would only do shelve stacking in a supermarket. He got the job and was put on till the first day, his worse nightmare...but gradually he realised that it wasn't that bad, and over the months working PT, he realised that he could deal with the public, even if it didn't come naturally.

His confidence grew massively. Then came being able to bake a phone call to public agencies, or potential employers without being in a complete state, approaching his Uni tutor when not happy with something to discuss the matter.

He started his career job and also experienced some panic attacks. It's horrible and I so feel for him, but he has learned that avoidance is not the answer, however strong the inner voice to do so is shouting. Things do get better and with that the confidence that he can cope along with his increased selfesteem.

Parents nowadays are much too quick to remove their children from any firm of anxiety. I get it, it's instinctive, but over time, it dors so much more damage than good. It's not about ignoring our children and their pain. It's about facing it with them throughout the journey.

We can't continue to evolve in a society where avoidance is the solution leading to more and more young people becoming older adults trapped in a life time of anxiety and depression feeling totally hopeless and fully reliant on others.

People are not taking responsibility for their health. They are not taking responsibility for the future health of their children. we are the sick nation of Europe

eat well
exercise
teach resilience not kindness
take pride in being able to support yourself and your family

as a country we are in a chicken and egg situation- we can’t pay for more mental health support if we are paying so many to stay at home

and the fact that we have more sick people than elsewhere suggests that there are significant numbers of people taking advantage , significant numbers of people who would find themselves able to work if their survival actually depended on it

Yep. There have been posters on these threads, saying they'll kill themselves if the government take their money away. I've even seen people on TV say it. I've had very similar things said to me as a way of coercion.

A bit like the Rwanda scheme - once it’s made clear that it is hard to get payments (and not on the strength of a zoom call-it’s harder to lie to someone’s face) fewer people will magically feel better. Rwanda,however unlikely it would be you were sent there, would have cut illegal immigrants.
Probably,like Rwanda, lawyers will make a killing fighting for the ‘deserving’ benefit earners. And the rest of us all loose.

I’m hopeful this may be a change for the better, I have extended family members who are young and NEETs, I am sure that work would be good for them, it appears to be a generational issue, with several older family members who have never done paid work or only minimal amounts. There’s a cycle of having kids, potentially generational trauma, and just giving up when it gets tricky. I am sure that for them not working is increasing MH issues. And for kids so young to just drop out is not good for anyone.

I am a teacher and really worry about our EBSA students who are increasing and back themselves into such small lives.

It’s a complex issue and it feels like government changes have tried to be nuanced and sought to redirect money to support.

I am also hopeful that it will be a change for the better. I am however very worried about the lack of jobs generally.

And if you read a couple of responses after yours by @Kendodd you can see that there are still many people who dismiss mental illnesses.

I'm feeling the stigma more than ever! Particularly since this recent narrative around misdiagnosis. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression 30 odd years ago. I've worked effing hard to overcome it, but still I have episodes. I'm already anticipating the eye rolls from colleagues and people in my arena who don't know my full (and frankly justified) history. My GP tells me I cope better than she would with everything I've been through. One of the best things to help someone with either of these diagnoses is being in a supportive environment with people who have time to listen and can work with the ebbs and flows to manage stressors and triggers. All of which is being eroded with the current narrative. I strongly object to people who experience MH issues having to justify their situation to all and sundry, often having to reveal more than they are comfortable with in order to garner support. The support needs to come from within the system and public trust built up again that professionals know what they're doing and advising accordingly.

I would agree, my eldest is 17 and a bright A-level student, she must have applied for 30 jobs before she landed one, she only got 2 interviews, most she just never heard anything, there are clearly far more people applying for entry jobs than jobs available. However with persistence most of her friends have eventually found something.

There are also definitely areas of the job sector that are understaffed, we are desperate for teachers, I’m just leaving a job and my school haven’t been able to recruit to replace me. I’m SENCO and when I’m looking for LSAs I’m lucky if I get one application, in the last 12 months my department has never been fully staffed. It’s not just SEN, even PE seems difficult to recruit for and I’ve never known that to be the case before.

It feels like there’s a disconnect between what is available and what people want to do? It’s definitely a very different labour market now compared to what it was 20 years ago when I was on my 20s.

As for the treatment… well there are hundreds of parents on this website alone with anxious/autistic/adhd teens who won’t leave the house and se unlikely to work in the near future. Often the parent is saying ‘this wouldn’t be happening if they’d had the right support’ but what does that mean? Often it means hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of therapy which frankly may or may not have worked. It’s not surprising the NHS can’t keep up when all of a sudden we have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people wanting diagnosis/therapy/meds for something which until 7 or 8 years ago was reasonably rare. MH treatment isn’t the silver bullet it’s made out to be on here, it’s very expensive and often ineffective beyond letting the person vent and feel a bit better for a few hours.

I don’t work in benefits but I meet benefit claimants every day and listen to them describing their circumstances. I would say benefits have been a huge mistake for 80% of them - the benefits have frankly enabled them to make whatever the qualifying problem was much worse. Anxious people who have been paid to stay at home for 5 years are now positively terrified of the outside world. Men who are a bit feckless and found it hard to hold down a job, have used their UC to spend years smoking weed and addling their brains to the point they’re actually unemployable now. These people exist in the hundreds in my town alone. If they had had to work out of necessity back when their issues were smaller, rather than being allowed to drop out of society at the expense of the taxpayer, I reckon they’d be in a much better place.
This, so much.

And now people are just self diagnosing/making up mental health issues? How the hell anyone believes anyone manages to claim PIP without a proper diagnosis is insanity itself

I do not think anyone is self diagnosing or making it up.

I do think some people's ability to cope/be resilient is lower than others, and i do not think that that is a medical issue. Its a mixture of personality, upbringing & lived experience, and environmental factors.

I think some people have a lower threshold at which they will regard a level of stress or pain they feel to be "severe" or intolerable. People will also have a different attitude as to what extent you must accept/tolerate a level of stress, worry, discomfort, challenge.

There is no world in which the UK is ever going to be able to provide thousands of quid🤐s worth of MH therapy OR lifelong benefits for a huge and ever growing portion of the population, even before considering things like the aging population and the dire need to spend more money on defense now the US has abandoned us. The UK will soon be poorer than Poland. We literally do not have the bloody money.

I take it you’ve never had to go thru the humiliating process of a PIP assessment. The fraud percentage is a shade above 0%.
This government will drive some of us to take our own lives. They absolutely don’t care and the fact that people actually believe the utter rubbish that is being spouted about us, the disabled, is heartbreaking. Utter despair and feeling worthless. 😭

I have worked along side people with BP and schizophrenia and I only knew because they told me so. They all functioned well at work, obviously they had medication.

Absolutely

This makes it sound like people with disabilities will now get less than people without disabilities - this isn't true, at all, they will still get more, it's just that the gap is being narrowed a bit.

From the article, as not sure if people are reading it:

I have spent a significant part of the past year working in an overstretched emergency department. I have been shocked at how many A&E patients I have seen present with mental health conditions. Often young and vulnerable, they attend with a variety of complex needs, none of which are easy for emergency teams to fix up, let alone properly fix.

Less surprising, but no more alarming, is that these patients have their issues exacerbated by the hospital setting, one that inherently is not suited to them, the very nature of emergency departments being loud, noisy and often full of chaos.

I sympathise with these patients who, often dealing with great turmoil in their lives and within themselves, have to wait for hours before being told that there is little to be done until they can be reviewed by the liaison psychiatry team.

At a time when such patients often wait more than 18 months to access appropriate treatment, the health secretary Wes Streeting ought not to be warning about the “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions.

If we were seeing an increase in patients with heart attacks, asthma exacerbations or arthritis, would we be referring to it as an “overdiagnosis”? I rather think we would be referring to it, rightly, as a crisis.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/wes-streeting-overdiagnosis-mental-health-adhd-b2716618.html

Jobs aren't non existent - there are lots of vacant roles.

How about a different suggestion.

How would people on here feel if this was approached via payments to employers for "eligible" employees?

Eg if you hire a PIP eligible person, the employer gets a payment or tax credit that lowers the cost of hiring them. This incentivises hiring people who might require more adjustments/be less productive.

Then for some people that access to work may actual help them or prevent them falling into the cycle of worklessness, and help them reach a stage where they no longer need eligibility for the top up

This combats many of the issues people raise on here.

Absolutely. The government have done so much damage letting it get so out of control.