DH has recently stopped claiming ESA. Success! In fact, he's one of the 36% who's dropped out of the system, which is brilliant, isn't it? Proves he was malingering all along, doesn't it? He's actually delighted not to be festering on benefits any more, and so am I. He's looking forward to working again. All round it's win-win for the state, for dh and for me. Huzza!
I'm a health care professional. When I assess someone, I look at their diagnosis first because it helps me consider what I am possibly going to see when I meet a patient. I do not consider the diagnosis as any kind of absolute, or more than a rough guide to what I MAY see during the assessment, and the kinds of tools that MAY be helpful in the session.
So I do agree that benefits should not be awarded on the basis of a diagnosis - people are individuals. That is the cruel thing about this system - it is, in its first principles, completely right and I agree with it. I also like very much the idea of the work-related activities group.
So: DH has schizoaffective disorder, and has had it for 25 years. He has major depressive episodes and psychosis involving hearing what other people are thinking - and it's always negative, angry, critical. Imagine working for 22 years with your co-workers' despising thoughts popping into your head, with the belief that you can hear your wife planning to leave you, your neighbours planning to attack you. Every day. You are a rational being so you know that it's not real, but when you are unwell (which you are for part of most days) the reality of it almost overwhelms you. Being in crowds, or group conversations, or sometimes seeing people at all, makes it painfully worse. To manage this, you take medication, some of which is highly sedating, some of which gives you insomnia, makes it extremely hard not to gain weight, gives you dry mouth, reduces your sense of taste, makes you shake, gives you an agonising restlessness called akinesia, gives you twitches which make people look at you, increasing your psychosis. Despite all this, you do manage, mostly, to work for over 2 decades. Gradually your time on sick leave creeps up, and it becomes clear that your employers are basically managing you out, increasing your stress level and increasing your sick leave. Vicious circle. Rather than be sacked and go on benefit, you try starting your own business. This works quite well initially and then goes downhill as the isolation kicks in and the responsibility of working alone eats into you. You never let a client down, never miss a deadline, and yet it is too much. Your self-esteem collapses, the losses of the years overwhelm you.
Eventually your doctor signs you off sick; you apply for Employment support Allowance. Work Capability Assessment; you are fit for work. Basically; you are lying, you are worthless. The papers are full of disability hate; sensibly, you stop reading them. You plunge into a depressive episode. Your wife is doing finals at the time and holds things together as best she can. Your son sees you suffering and begins to have night terrors. Your doctor gives your wife the details of the local benefit adviser; they basically guarantee you that the appeal will be successful with the adviser's help; he has barely lost a case since the new system started. You drag through the months to appeal, gathering evidence, letters, reading about all the worst parts of your illness. You spend weeks barely going out of the house. You obsessively recalculate the household budget, what if, what if? Your wife comes home from work and spends the evening talking you down from your fears, trying to bring you out of your obsessive ruminations on the past, the future. She is knackered and worried that she will not be able to continue with her new job. It pays £7K a year, so the benefit is pretty much essential.
Appeal day: the tribunal reads your paperwork, rings you up and says not to bother coming to the hearing; 15 points, your benefit is reinstated. On the medical evidence, NOT the diagnosis.
You have been left hollowed out by the process. You hate yourself and feel worthless as you never have before. You try to come off medication. Six months of hell ensue, darkness as never before. Your wife gets a better-paying job; you are no longer eligible for benefit anyway, but you still get national insurance contributions paid, and there is still recognition in you receiving the benefit that you ARE ill, you are not malingering.
May; the notification for this year's work capability assessment arrives. You plunge into a psychotic episode. Your wife is stretched across a chasm; she is working full-time with a new employer, managing childcare for your son as you cannot safely look after him, trying to catch official letters before you see them so that you cannot obsess over them, talking to you, trying to work out if it is safe to leave you during the day, endlessly on the phone. Your son starts talking about killing himself; it turns out he is being bullied at school. You and your wife agree to pull out of the system.
That, in my opinion, is a genuine success of the system; DH has been driven out of it at a cost to his wellbeing and a cost to our whole family that I doubted our ability to pay; but there we are, he is better (today) so we managed to pay it, and we are still together (sort of) and surviving. He is talking about going back to work, which is good; I personally will believe it when I see it; for example, I asked if he would pick something up from a shop in town today, the first errand I have asked him to do in a very long time. He didn't manage it. I can't imagine him working anywhere, if I'm quite honest, though I have to talk him through the possibility of doing so, every single night, there is barely a night we aren't having the same fucking conversation. The lack of belief from his fellow taxpayers is a fairly brutal experience, to be honest.
I would apologise for such a long post, but I am past apologising. It won't have changed anybody's mind, no doubt.