I HATE ALL THESE PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT WELLNESS RECOVERY ACTION PLANS AND EMPOWERMENT AND SUCCESSFUL MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE.

it is bullcrap.
pendulum, MDF, rethink, all these people are saying the same thing…..that with some support and therapy and the right meds everybody can cope and be successful and (more to the point) taxpayers. I don’t think these organisations help us in the long run. Yes, some people can get better, manage their condition, but some can’t. And all these organisations do is persuade the public that everyone can get well, the public end up getting more and more of a must try harder, pull your socks up attitude. Manage on your own, don’t be lazy, get it together, get a work ethic and stop scrounging.

Empowerment is not only a repulsive buzzword but also a sly way of turning people against an expensive group of needy people.

PS – Woobegone, you don’t have to be depressed to antidepressants – you just need a good relationship wih a GP – and most of them are really friendly. Nevertheless, I hope you’re in a seretonin rich mood – and that it lasts a long time;)

Lilliput

Real, severe mental illness is probably the worst thing that can happen to someone. It’s at least as devastating as fatal physical illness, worse in many cases.

However, this doesn’t mean that everyone who is currently described as “mentally ill” is actually severely ill. 1 in 4 people are not, in any meaningful sense, mentally ill. Society would collapse if that were really the case.

Sincerely,
Woobegone
(citalopram 60mg/day for depression)
(author of academic papers on depression)
(doesn’t make assumptions about people he’s never met)

The so-called ‘sick society’ is not a new idea of course – and different groups do seem to react differently to stress.
Take doctors and nurses, nurses throw far more ‘sickies’ than their medical counterparts – why is that ?
Various theories have been put forward, including lower status, less control in the workplace, mostly female workforce (and hence hidden agendas like child care issues, etc, etc).

I do think it isimportant NOT to penalise those with serious mental health problems (like schizophrenia) because of an upturn in claimants – bendy girl is absolutely correct to point out that ATTITUDE is an incredibly important element when it comes to offering a humane form of assessment.

anti-stigma campaigning, including minds own, completely explains that very few people with serious mental illnesses actually look mad.

so any comments about requiring this visual nature are obviously unresearched, based on an inexperienced viewpoint and based around that rather typical “burn the witch” reaction that many like to have….

i would love to explain what it’s like to go through hell only to be told by a psych that nothing is wrong.

dissmissiveness is this systems game. anyone who disagrees is to be terminated.
or so it would seem.

i just love all the inexperienced views.

Also, to take either the left (everyone’s a victim!) or right (everyone’s a scrounger!) is a dangerous line to take. I spoke with a psychiatrist in charge on one district about a year ago, who has treated mentally ill people all his life. He described a staggering increase in people turning up on his list who were not in an identifiable way mentally ill by any medical standards, but were generally a bit useless, a bit unhappy or just had a tendency to be unnecessarily violent or unsociable. So far as he could tell, despite them having nothing specifically wrong with them, they had just never been expected to take any responsiblity for their actions. I suppose one might describe these people as having ‘social problems’ but they are certainly now turning up on incapacity benefit, and they are starting to give people with real mental health problems a bad name.

James terms the condition “affluenza” and warns the consequence of our current lifestyle (for many) is the the three A’s” – anomie, alienation and addiction – it goes without saying that the USA is the epicentre of this alleged phenomena ?

alcoholism – Does not exist . The answer is stop drinking and the extent to which it is a medical problem is highly debatable , it probably covers a welter of social emotional and medical problems . How exactly are you going to start handing out jobs to drinkers . That’s really going to work isn’t it ….

your pals the bankers

That was New Labour`s fault and New Labour`s policy and I would have much slower and more cautious protecting the tax payer. Not me matey

Merry Christmas, old boy.

Alas, my friend – you are still a tragedy.

Are you seriously describing schizophrenia, alcoholism as ‘a bit miz’? ZZZZzzzzzzzzz. The only people I know who got a big bailout for being a bit miz this year were your pals the bankers – socialism/welfare/IB for the rich and all that. That’s been enough to make me very depressed. Got to go back to work tomorrow, and am just hoping that there’ll still work to go back to, etc, and all because the private sector’s stuck its sticky hands in the till to an even greater extent than all these loathed people on benefits…

I have to bugger on, though…

With good reason .In this country unemployment figures are kept down by signing people off as incapacitated because they are bit miz ( sad face ) or have achy backs irritable bowels and anything not provably a lie . 2·6 million people are claiming incapacity benefit (up from 740,000 in 1983), even though by the Government’s own estimates more than one million of them are not remotely disabled. ( God knows what the truth is ! )
The upshot is that taxpayers are being defrauded and their justifiable fury is directed at the mentally ill in as much as that refers to Borderline Personality Disorder. You want to make this even worse ? Well good luck I think everyone is sick of being conned and we cannot afford it .
The sort of regime you are nebulously describing would require Swedish tax levels even if it were possible .This would mean its not worth getting out of bed with UK property prices and natural wealth per capita .I would stay in bed and develop emotional problems , it shouldn’t be hard I`d pretty much want to die in such a country anyway.
On mental health it is not clear that the vast sums wasted on therapy have ever done any good for anyone . Lets cut that . On the other hand I am in favour of getting the ill out of our prisons off the street and back into institutions that can cope . On the endless penumbra of emotional problems . I sympathise ( more than I can possibly say) but this is vast spectrum. Agraphobia and anxiety related problems can indeed be debilitating for example , on the other hand a lot of people just like droning on about themselves (Me for example ).Much of this is just a lot of cock. There is already a great deal of support but the problem is lack of diagnosis and treatment .

Some things have to be faced alone and the only answer is to take courage and keep buggering on.

PS Brown on skivers

In the 2000 Budget, Mr Brown rightly concluded: “The problem of Britain’s most deprived areas is not necessarily a lack of jobs – in almost every case, these areas sit alongside, and within travelling distance of, labour markets with high levels of vacancies.” In his pre-Budget report the following year, Mr Brown said: “[The] increase in the number of people on sickness and disability-related benefits cannot be explained by a general decline in the overall health of the population.”

I’d say they’re the ones who should be seeing the new CBT-R-Us therapists.

Regarding the modern life making more people ill (or not) debate, I could go on for 10,000 words, but feel there are a number of strands to this:

a) As alluded to by the A&E charge nurse, definitions matter. It can be argued that the anti-stigma message, or at least the tactics used to date, while worthwhile, have had unintended consequences. The ‘normalisation’ agenda, or the depiction of all MH lying along the one spectrum does assist in reducing prejudice, but sometimes leads to the less-than-helpful assumption by the worried well/slightly sad etc that they understand severe and enduring MH problems and also to think that they have a MH problem. Some may, but when resources are definitely finite, I’d be wary of pathologising regular but upsetting emotions.
b)This very mild MH problem sector (if indeed we even dub it MH, and not some othery phrase like emotional resilience/wellbeing) is a bottomless pit of ‘need’: not need in a strict clinical sense, but folk want a service to stop their unhappiness. the nearest match in their eyes are the already stretched MH services, so that’s who they ask for help. Should MH services be dealing with such folk? I’d most certainly say no and focus resources on severe and enduring problems,others may disagree.
c) everyone knows the Tories in the 80s shoved people on to Incapacity to massage unemployment figures. The ‘diagnosis’ of depression was attached to folk for diverse and inconsistent reasons (again pathologising folk who shouldn’t be). Another cluster of MH users, who aren’t or at least who muddy the waters.
d) Layard, Dame Carol Black and Purnell & co. Not a MH specialist or (out) user among them, but they have set the tone for MH for the future. The money’s going to go on a CBT practitioner for every street corner, six sessions from someone who’s done a fortnight-long course, and if you’re not sorted then tough, that’s your lot, oh, and forget about benefits. I exaggerate but look at IAPT and tell me there’s not truth in there: underpinning it all is the worklessness agenda, and the need, explicit in Layard (an economist) to keep workers happy and in their drone-like minimum-wage drudgery, and off the sick.
You and I may (rightly) think that a sane response to being in a shitty, low-security, min-wage job, with a touch of bullying etc on top would be to feel unhappy. Not so, for layard and purnell, who do seem to subscribe to the work makes you happy doctrine, and that not liking work is a sign of mental ill-health. Utter bollocks, as it all depends on the type of work, doesn’t it, but there again, they’ve never done shitty jobs, have they.
e) this naturally leads on to the stick approach, whereby lots of genuine (severe and enduring) mental health service users will have their human rights impinged upon, because they’ll be pressured into woefully inadequate and unsuitable CBT, little else,or lose their benefits. Try asking for other talking treatments, or carrots instead of the stick. Add in compulsory Community treatment, all about things being done to the user, not with.

If someone has schizophrenia, which is very highly genetic, and at the age of 18 they stop talking to people, spend all their time in their room and start to believe that ghosts are stealing their thoughts, I think most people would agree that they’re ill. (If not, get back to the 1960s, frankly.)

On the other hand if someone is otherwise fine but is having trouble sleeping because they’re worrying about the stresses of work, are they ill?

Maybe they are, but maybe they’re not, most people would probably say no (although most people might be wrong), and it’s a major question which current psychiatric diagnosis (DSM-IV) has just swept under the carpet.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12042226
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11261644

Although drug abuse seems to be a much bigger risk.

The thing is, though, schizophrenia is not the same as depression which is not the same as anxiety problems… saying “the mentally ill are statistically less likely to perpetrate violent crime” is just as wrong as saying “the mentally ill are statistically MORE likely to perpetrate violent crime” – it depends on which mentally ill people you’re talking about.

Likewise, not giving someone a job because they’re spider-phobic or because they suffered from “mild depression” 10 years ago or because they were bulemic as a teenager and they’re now 30 would be a ridiculous decision (not least because a huge % of people would fit those criteria for a history of “mental illness”).

Not giving someone a job because they’re schizophrenic or severely bipolar is quite another thing. I’m sure there’s a case that such people should have special protection from discrimination, but it’s a difficult situation with arguments on both sides – it’s not at all *obvious* that they should, certainly not in the way that it’s obvious that ethnic & sexual minorities should have protection.

There’s more about this on my blog, but here’s a precis:

Yes, there are more people receiving IB now than there were a generation ago. No, this does not mean that all of the extra people are skivers who’d rather sit around watching Trisha and drinking milkshakes. The sweeping social change that has transformed society in the past fifty years has led to an increase in the numbers of those deemed unable to work due to mental illness for many reasons. Not only has society become more treacherous and unpredictable and the working world more stressful (especially in stonkingly pro-market, anti-worker countries which exempt themselves from working time directives) but more men and women are expected to hold down full-time jobs which are increasingly focused in the service, information and fourth-sector industries, meaning that it’s more important for these employees to be entirely mentally and emotionally on the ball. Simply put: as the labour market is changing and becoming more mentally and physically stressful, the mentally ill, whose care has been successively eroded by government after neoliberal government, are being left out in the cold..

Just look at Mind’s recent report on mental illness within parliament itself. Twenty-seven percent of MPs, Peers and their staff have personal experience of mental health difficulty, and one in three said work-based stigma and the expectation of a hostile reaction from the media and public prevented them from being open about mental health issues. This is a problem that touches everyone, and it isn’t going to go away if we collectively stick our fingers in our ears and sing a little song.

Statistically, whilst rates of severe mental conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other complaints which may have genetic components have remained stable, there does seem to have been a rise in the rates of depression, anxiety, compulstions and stress-related conditions. Many psychiatrists believe that some of the structures of modern life, including the modern workforce but also the wider implocations of industrialisation and social change, are partly to blame. That doesn’t mean that social change and industrialisation are bad: it simply means that we must accept mental illness as a challenge that cannot be overlooked in the modern age. It is our task as a generation to be equal to the pace of this change.

Yet leaving aside organic brain disorders like Huntingdons Chorea few, if any mental disorders have any PROVEN biological basis (lots of theories though).
The unsatisfactory position we have at the moment is that mental illness is something that is determined by a psychiatrist but without any biological evidence.
Needless to say there are studies which suggest that not even psychiatrists can always agree (amongst themselves) with the phenomena they are dealing with.

Take drug and alcohol dependence, are these really mental illnesses (as opposed to existential problems) – according to the Torygraph around 100,000 with drink/drug problems receive IB, a figure that has doubled in less than 10 years.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1531201/100%2COOO-drug-addicts-and-alcoholics-on-benefits.html

I understand that there are approx 2.6 mil claiming IB (at a cost of £12 billion, annually) – the figure 20 years ago was around 700,000 claimants.

Is modern life is making more people mentally ill or has the term mental illness become so ubiquitous that it is sometimes difficult to know what it is really meant to signify ?

Also, on a wider note, the point of One In Four is that it’s a lifestyle magazine for people with mental health difficulties – it’s *not* about the politics of mental health. I wrote quite a lot of the last feature on welfare reform, much as I wanted to barnstormingly say ‘we’re all fucked!’, was geared towards how people with mental health difficulties can cope with the changes. It was about explaining what’s happening without scaremongering, nothing more, nothing less.

However – if, as you say, these user groups are boycotting, then we need to know how we’re letting them down. Feel free to pass on my work email address (laurie at socialspider dot com) or give me theirs, and I shall endeavour to respond personally in consultation with the editor.