I was taking to a nurse when the next thing I remember was a doctor shoving a tube down my throat and blood every where, I had a fit then a stroke, and a blood vessel had ruptured in my throat. six weeks after that I was up again sitting in a chair when a doctor said look you have a lesion of the spinal cord you will never walk again, when he walked out I reached up broke a light bulb and cut my wrists.

I could go on but just to say I spent eighteen months in hospital, and spent long periods now just having injection pain killers and respite care.

I’ve lost the use of my bowel. my bladder, my legs, Sex is nothing anymore. I was 28 years old.

A year ago I was asked to attend an interview for the pathways to work, the bloke a spotty faced little twerp said being disabled is not a reason to sit at home, he was eighteen perhaps nineteen and was trained so he told me as a medical adviser.

He said you can work so they told me I must go through six interviews, at my Pathways to work meeting spotty looked for work for me, he said how about handing out baskets at Asda, hold on we have a job here for a painter and decorator, taxi driver, or perhaps window cleaning, now before you say your a lier my MP wrote to the DWP for me, I was called back into the pathways to work to be seen by a doctor, he sat in the chair and said what bloody idiot called you for a work interview.

In October this year, we will have a new benefit called ESA, I will be losing £12 from my massive £87 a week, I will need to undergo another medical if I pass this one I will be told to get benefits I will need to undergoing training to do voluntary work.

Now then I will accept that if a person can work he should, I’d love to work, but I’ve serious problems due to my condition for example I will fall asleep at anytime, if the pain gets to severe I will have a fit, my kidneys and liver, my bowel and ,my bladder have all moved within my body cavity.

SO tell me gents who in his right mind will employ me, make no mistake I will never ever work a 40 hour a week or a 30 hour week. I even now spend one week a month in respite care.

Believe me I wished and still wish I had in fact died.

To make it better, I( was asked last month why is it people do not work when it’s obviously an excuse.

I earned £35,000 a year, I had just been promoted onto the football league linesman’s list , and I would give this up for £87 a week are they mad.

I’m trying to make another point as well, which we haven’t really addressed in this thread – what should we DO with people in these situations? Do we just cut our losses and have a cull? Do we just cut people like this loose altogether – no support, no money, no rehab (even if most people start using again after it)? Or do we put an emphasis on better rehab, support and training programmes, etc?

I decided to start getting out there and talking to people like Kelvin and Natalie for the very simple reason that I dislike the way that people who are on benefits are targeted by politicians who wish to appeal to less-pleasant aspects of human nature and score a few political points. It’s flippant and tediously opportunistic. It’s not about creating something better – just about making the rest of us resent each other a little more. It’s all very dreary. You’ll see I began this article with a reference to a one-liner on the Conservative party website – a one-liner that I thought was too glib for this subject.

The Kelvins and Natalie of this world continue to exist, whether the rest of us like it or not. This thread would suggest that the rest of us don’t like it, and that there isn’t a lot of sympathy for people who can’t stay off the gear. The thing is – they’re still there, and will continue to be there. They cost us a fortune in police time, social services resources and god knows what else. Ignoring and resenting them doesn’t make them go away. It doesn’t make the rest of us any better, either, and I wonder how much money it really saves.

It’s interesting, though, that people think that those born with the addict’s personality can easily choose whether or not to use. I never thought that choice was easy at all.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this elsewhere, but accomodating an addictive personality seems to me to make sense. Sure, they will die young, but accomodation would mean that they didn’t have to be criminal about it. Y’know, robbing folk blind and such like.

This entire arguement seems to me to be based on criminalising something that should be a matter of choice.

You wanna die young? Your local pharmacy can take care of you!

Very Darwinian, I’d have thought.

Narc’d, Taking this comment at face value, being on benefits is a difficulty in itself. This is a problem we can easily solve by disallowing their claim to benefits. We can at least remove one problem from these poor people.

Obviously you do not mean that. You are regarding the fact that someone is on benefits as proof that something terrible has happened to them. But I am asking what that terrible thing is.

And people do not give up because life is “too hard”. No one fights so hard as a man who is starving, except , perhaps, a man whose children are. They give up because struggle is pointless, which is not at all the same thing. If I have no money and no one will give me any, I will certainly take whatever job is going, illegally below minimum wage if necessary, like illegal immigrants picking strawberries. But if I lose a pound in benefits for every pound I earn, then work is indeed pointless.

Under such circumstances, I have no direct control over my income, and might as well give up.

On the other hand, I still have indirect control over my income. I may still be able to induce the powers that be to grant me with further benefits, in cash or in kind.

The sort of person they reward, is the sort of person I must endeavour to appear to be.

Why are people so opposed into making people work for their benefits? Is there something so wrong with asking someone who is entirely un-employable to do some community service, even volunteering with people in hostels and on rehab programmes, perhaps reading groups of kids with parents who have addiction that can’t do it themselves, there are so many ways they could contribute to society rather than just taking.

Take the prisons. They are largely full of illiterate mentally ill drug addicts. Not so many calculating criminals who thought the risk of a prison sentence would on balance be worth taking. Why is this? Because we get the punishments about right but we completely fail with literacy, drugs and mental health. If got those right instead, and didn’t bother to punish people properly, the prisons, I suggest would be full of calculating criminals instead.

So, as well as punishing – dealing with those who make the wrong moral choices – we should help those who are so dysfunctional that they are barely making choices at all. Only with the combination of people making choices and the wrong choices being punished, will we make progress.

Instead we have this sterile argument where the left focuses on the responsibility of the government and state, and the right on the responsibility of the individual. Both easy arguments because both are right, but neither diminishes the responsibility of the other in the slightest.

And so we have the same in welfare. Blame the victims of poverty or blame the system. The point of blame in both cases is to deny the other responsibility.

But I don’t bitch about paying tax for my nephews education or my dad’s healthcare… These things deserve more funding…

However the emergence of the underclass with their state funded lifestyles is a cancer eating away at this country.

In broad terms the human existence is driven by purpose – get an education then a job then a family yadda yadda.. or whatever your choice might be.. but it’s your choice and the choice to do bugger all should not be one that can be selected at will…

The dole engenders a life of.. “fuck it.. nothing I do makes a damn bit of difference, I’ll smoke me fags and wait for the next dole cheque..”

Lo and behold if these people dont go slightly bonkers… and where we really see the effects are on theiri kids who are brought up with no moral or societal framework, drift into petty crime and then they’re the next headline, killing someone for random kicks becuase “nothing I do makes a damn bit of difference”…

Throwing more money at this is exacerbating this, and more fundamentally is starving the funding from areas (healtchare, education, the army, the police, that do deserve funding..

You may thnk I’m another heartless Tory creep… but you’re guiding an underclass of millions to hell on your golden road of (utterly misguided) good intentions…

Absolutely not! Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that. It would be good to explore the repeatedly raised accusation of the ‘moral high ground’ when social care issues are discussed.

Unfortunately neither Kelvin nor Natalie are likely to contribute to this thread. Why not?

Too kind.
And I always enjoy looking up to you lot, so comfortably ensconsed on the moral high ground – is there enough oxygen up there?
It’s win-win for both sides!
How boring would it be if every comment was just “great post”?

“The right-wing Tory press point their hairy fingers at the underclass, their creation…”

“Why are we addicts? $64,000 question. Genetic? Hereditary? Chemical imbalance? Mental health? Abuse? Money? And we all chose this horrible enduring nightmare. FFS…”

Yes, that is the $64,000 question.
I’m sorry, but I believe that people are moral agents who can and do make choices.
Not automata, created by the press.

“from your Daily Mail troll point of view – got a job, whats the problem”
That’s kind of my view, yes.
Of course the problem is prohibition – which I oppose.
Legalise and divert cash spent on the lunatic “war on drugs” to treatment.

That, unfortunately, is not the Daily Mail line.

Good call. I think this especially whenever when cjcjc comes on. It’s kind of like watching a pimply and inarticulate schoolboy trying to desperately to get attention by hitting girls he likes with his schoolbag.

Reading these comments on a ‘liberal’ leftie site I’m just staggered by the apparent ignorance and lack of care some of these commenters/trolls show.

Well, I can’t ban right-wingers from coming here and discussing issues. Keeps us on our toes I guess. And it reminds us why we’re on the left and not hanging out with the Tories.

>If they are as smart as all that, what are they doing to improve their situation?

It is the combination of circumstances that conspire. Being on benefits is hard enough. Throw in an addiction issue, perhaps follow up with abuse and a few other nasties and however smart you may be, life can get too hard. You may no longer care

@1 & others On ‘complexity’, work, etc

I’m an addict and I’m responding to your troll. I have been an addict for the last 39 years since I was 12. Unlike Kelvin and Natalie I have a job and unlike both of them I have kept my children. Unlike them, you may not realise I was an addict if you met me.

Lets talk about complexity first. I have to deal with the complexity of ‘normal’ life like everybody else and that is hard enough. On top of this, every day is also informed by addiction. Either trying to be straight or dealing with the consequences of using. Rehab, withdrawal, the incredible effort of keeping a habit going, funding it and trying to lead a ‘normal’ life (from your Daily Mail troll point of view – got a job, whats the problem). No lifetime of benefits dependency here. On the contrary.

However. Being an addict, I’m very aware of *just* how quickly I could find myself sleeping rough behind Deptford Church, and that has been true for years. Depending on what postcode you ‘live’ in you are either lucky with rehab and addiction help or you aren’t. If you can’t get help you may end up like Kelvin & Natalie. Even with help you might. People like them are seriously disadvantaged and circumstances make ‘simple’ things like getting a job extraordinarily difficult. Where does the employer send the acceptance letter? Ever lived in a hostel? I doubt it, or you wouldn’t come up with glib comments like ‘What is preventing Kelvin from working?’. Would you employ him?

So what is my point? I’m very very lucky. I’m educated, earning, loved and hopefully articulate. Kelvin & Natalie might have one out of four of those advantages, many have none. We have something in common though which from the sounds of it you don’t. We are addicts. I have enormous respect and sympathy for anybody who is in their situation because life is very very hard at that level. Why are we addicts? $64,000 question. Genetic? Hereditary? Chemical imbalance? Mental health? Abuse? Money? And we all chose this horrible enduring nightmare. FFS…

Reading these comments on a ‘liberal’ leftie site I’m just staggered by the apparent ignorance and lack of care some of these commenters/trolls show. ‘I’ve been on benefits’. Big fucking deal mate. Try doing some voluntary work with your local social services community drug and alcohol team and speak from a position of strength. Of course, I making the assumption that you haven’t had too much contact with the Kelvins & Natalies of the world, but I’m basing that on your comments.

How can someone be be both smart and helpless?

If they are as smart as all that, what are they doing to improve their situation?

Probably, quite a short lifetime.

I don’t think folk like that are claiming any sort of high moral ground. Not that you were explicit, exactly.

Correct me if I am wrong.

Difficult, complicated lives?
Were these imposed upon them by force, or did they – do they – have any choice, any agency, any responsibility at all?

1. How is it that people writing here do not seem to be acquainted personnally with people on benefit who have difficult, complicated lives- a group which in my experience includes quite a lot of those on long-term benefits?
2. The simple cases, the system deals with pretty well. The cheats do not get away with it as easily as they used to. But the difficult cases are still there as they always were and there seem to be more of them. A system which organises effective. continuing, reliable but not permissive personal contact remains theonly way of coping with their problems. Why do we seem to have less and less such elements in the system?
3.”The Conservatives, THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT and the Daily Mail argue, as we all know, in the simplest terms, i.e. drugs = bad, immigrants = bad, paying your way = good,” Why do the words I have put in capitals fit so naturally in the sentence? LibDems or Greens do not fit there.

A lifetime of benefit dependency. A high price for them to pay in order for you to stake your claim to the moral high ground, don’t you think?

There are some really good and successful schemes which help people who have addictions and other problems get jobs and stay in them. One tricky problem, which advisers and people who work on this struggle with is the fact that a majority of employers in a survey said that they would not consider employing anyone who has mental health problems. It doesn’t matter how hard you punish people if employers won’t hire them.

I also think a million times more highly of Natalie and Kelvin then I do of someone who spends their time pontificating in the way that you’ve been doing about a subject which they know nothing about.