From Monday the DWP will announce that mental health co-ordinators will be based in Jobcentres.
The plans, which will make mental health treatment and particularly cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) central to the fight to get Britain back to work after the recession, will eventually see centres providing CBT set up around the country.
Jobcentre Plus will be, at some stage, encouraged to send unemployed people for CBT without a doctor’s referral.
Under the plans, unemployed people would be eligible for eight therapy sessions immediately. Within five years anyone, including people in work, would be allowed to “refer themselves in” for treatment.
One in four people are likely to experience a mental health problem and the effects on the jobs market are acute. Some 6 million adults in the UK have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety, many of whom are on incapacity benefit.
The move follows years of lobbying by Tony Blair’s “happiness tsar”, economist Lord Layard. Provision of cognitive behaviour therapy on the NHS was his earlier triumph but Layard has continued to lobby for it to be central to the jobs strategy.
But shouldn’t the role of the Jobcentre be about administering the benefits system which is difficult and bureaucratic enough? What kind of training have these mental health co-ordinators had? Will they be civil servants trained up or actual mental health professionals? Also, these proposals only offer CBT to people who are out of work? Is this therapy going to be used as a useful tool in getting people back into the job market or will it be about bullying and cajoling? Will they be sanctioned if they refuse? How much say does the claimant get? What about others who may believe that they will benefit from a course of CBT but can’t get access to it as the waiting lists are unbelievably long. These proposals also bypass the GP, what are their views on this? The reasons I ask these questions is I am utterly cynical, skeptical and knowing the MO of NL there’s the inevitable sting in the tail…..
And it is rather pathetic (but hey, not a surprise) that Purnell said that ‘mild depression doesn’t have to be a barrier to work’…
What precisely is ‘mild depression’ how does he categorise/classify it? He also underestimates the destructiveness of depression. And it how vary from day to day, life experience to life experience, throw that into the mix of a complex and contradictory society. Also, tell that to employers when they discard someone’s application form ‘cos they experience(d) mental distress!!
A society based fundamentally on exploitation and alienation (even more alienating in some job sectors with the implementation of the LEAN mean production scheme) with increased stress, anxiety, distress and misery coupled with the impact of the recession. These proposals don’t really demonstrate good intentions for people with depression getting back into the job market or about their needs (I mean, how about therapy tailored for the individual?) They smack of supply-side economics, the unemployed depressed drone given x number of sessions of CBT is thrown back on the conveyor belt of rat race quicker than you can say Marx’s labour theory of value. And where the hell are these mythical jobs..??!!
A society that devalues and belittles….and they wonder why so many people are so depressed.
Oh, and I was waiting for ‘tsar’ Layard to pop up with his sugar coated happiness corporate capitalist approved prescriptions.
The early theorising of neo-liberalism was about creating a new kind of self reliant human indifferent to the needs and wants of others except as expressed through money. We need a society that gives people the space to be happy. You cannot be happy in a social environment where you face continual dispossession and exploitation. The citizen of an industrial society today can be no more happy than the subsistence farmer confronting plagues of locusts and the depredations of the local landowner.
And let’s face these proposals are not about what is best suited to the individual based on clinical judgement instead it is driven by government policy and ideology.
This is Soviet shit (and the authoritarian end state of neoliberalism is being revealed), some jobcentre desk filler does not have the right to refer a person for aggressive psychotherapy (CBT is at base behavioural adjustment and even its shills will admit it does not suit all people- and its critics say it in fact works a lot less than is claimed by careerist psychologists chasing all that lovely state cash) which will presumably be accompanied by mentions of threats of benefits being stopped etc. at some stage. The state mandating your mind under threat of homelessness and starvation is simply horrific. In fact given stressors will worsen depression and lead to suicide this is close to corporate manslaughter, so people are morally allowed to take reasonable measures to defend themselves against this attack.
And if you must kill yourself make it a murder suicide instead, involving a DWP minister.
But for client confidentiality I could bore everyone with the lastest howlers from the DWP in ubderstanding their own regulations.They take for ever to complete the wretched ESA assessments. Strange as the result is always the same: you are fit for work and do not have “limited capability for work”. The idea of this lumbering bureaucracy dishing out medical treatments is quite frightening.
Just when you hit mental rock bottom Yvette Cooper wants to invade your brain…
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