Thank you for sharing this. Wish you well in your current employment and hope you continue to be well.

I wish also for your story to be distributed far and wide as an example of what happens in people’s lives who have to sign off as sick – recognising that having useful employment might help them if only there were jobs around, and that in the meantime, sufficient support, financial and social, is needed. Not vile abuse, assumptions of laziness or scamming the system.

People want to remember: ‘there but for fortune go I’. Or: ‘If you tolerate this, your children/parents/self will be next.’

Thank you so much for this article. This rings true with my own experiences of depression and work. I want to work, am mentally sharp and intelligent, yet anxiety (a feature of post-alcoholism) paralyses my ability to get out and about – and therefore get to a job. My doctor says: “Perhaps you need some anxiety counselling”. Well, that was a year ago; since then, another year of my life has passed by without me having contributed anything positive to society. I wish someone could give me the tools to get past this anxiety and depression so I can get on with my life. Before anyone can describe me as a “bum”, prior to the depression kicking in I was a model employee, regularly classed as giving “outstanding performance”. I’d just love some more support so I can get off my bottom and do something useful.

This is a super post and a message that needs to be shouted from the rooftops.

It’s good timing as well; as it’s World Mental Health Day.

“Almost anyone could have my experience, with poor mental health being caused and exacerbated by unemployment.”

A good message, but I suspect it won’t convince as many people as it should. A lot of people in the “claimants are scroungers” camp seem to divide the world into Us and Them, and obviously losing your job and developing mental illnesses is something that happens to Them, not Us.

It is the intention of the Tory party to batter everyone in the country both umemployed , sick or working down to the poverty level and if the great recovery should come just like under Thatcher they can claim the credit for it

It soon won’t much matter how many points you get. You can be clinically depressed, paralysed from the neck down, riddled with cancer – after 12 months the benefit stops. The coalition is effectively abolishing incapacity benefit/ESA for all but a small number of individuals on supplementary benefit. The fact that this will drive many severely disabled people back into a life of institutional care with all the costs involved doesn’t seem to have been factored in. Ironically, disabled benefits were initially introduced to enable claimants to live ‘in the community’ because this would be more cost-effective!

This is an issue not just for ‘disabled people’ – some ‘other’ – it will have a devastating effect on the lives of anyone who becomes disabled or has a disabled child or other family member.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m glad you are better now.

Thank you for your courage.

When the black dog depression grabs one by the neck it can seem there is nothing that can be done about anything.

The fact that a person is suffering a serious depression is not helped by having to cope with a badly geared benefits test at a time of recession.

Best of luck with the job and thanks for sharing

It’s the politics of identity politics, embraced by the government. The unemployed and disabled are “them”. And Labour has concurred.

The warped standards with which the society judges those on sickness benefits sets us all up for a miserable and self-loathing experience of unemployment.

What warped standards are these? The ones that involve the majority of people paying hundreds of millions every year to support the ill? In exchange for which all they ask is one small medical examination?

Difficult events plus a predisposition towards depression has meant life has often been a rollercoaster of trying to cope.

Well it is tragic that this has befallen you, but you cannot use one anecdotal case to condemn the entire system.

The application process was humiliating, and unfit for assessing varying mental health conditions, exacerbating feelings of self-loathing. Scoring zero points in the assessment confirmed my belief that I was weak and lazy, not depressed, a reaction stemming from prevailing societal attitudes and the illness itself.

I am sorry you found the experience humiliating, but so what? Isn’t that a small price to pay for benefits? Why shouldn’t the rest of us ask for something in exchange for the hundreds of billions we spend on health care alone much less the sums we spend on benefits? Scoring zero? So a medical test found you able to work. Which you had been doing and would go on to do?

came off the anti-depressants I couldn’t believe were helping

They almost certainly did not. Nor did the benefits. It is a scandal that we coped better with mental illness 100 years ago. That Nigeria and India treat their depressed and even schizophrenic patients with more success than we do now. The routine use of anti-depressants is unbelievable.

I took the discussion of sickness claimants who are ‘not really ill’ as directed at me.

But isn’t that just a symptom of your illness?

A myth is perpetuated that once signed off, no one claiming sickness benefit would ever work again unless forced. It’s not true. Unemployment is confidence draining and deadly dull, sapping motivation and thus appearing to expose the claimant as ‘just lazy’.

It is a pretty convincing myth backed up by quite a lot of evidence. Of course unemployment is soul destroying – thus making the sick sicker and hence even less likely to go back to work. Somehow people have to find the resources from within to over come not only their illness, but also the damage living on benefits does to them. Which is why they should be forced back into work as soon as possible.

Those who judge others by these warped standards should be warned: the harder you are on others now, the more you’ll loath yourself when it’s you.

You say this as if it is a valid point. More self loathing may even be good.

Almost anyone could have my experience, with poor mental health being caused and exacerbated by unemployment. Many who face long-term joblessness because of their mental health conditions have far more serious challenges to overcome than I did.

And yet your conclusion is that they need more benefits? Surely the only proper conclusion is that the mentally ill – especially the walking wounded who can work – should be required to do so in all possible circumstances as it is beneficial to their illness?

They may never have their confidence built by a job where they are truly valued, and society tells them they’re to blame for that.

That is, they may be on benefits for life. Just as the myth says.

@11 – So, you also deny the benefits of mental health care. There’s no science you won’t attack.

And guess what? When there are conditions which won’t and don’t get better? Repeated medical examinations are a waste of cash.

And of course you need to “force” them to go back to work before people can recover. They might realise that medical advice is actually valid, and they should actually take the periods that doctors recommend off work!

No, punish the sick more. Make them BEG. Like the non-humans you view them as. Treating a dog like the system treats sick people would be illegal.

Damn Italics. My mistake.

2. Jo

I want to work, am mentally sharp and intelligent, yet anxiety (a feature of post-alcoholism) paralyses my ability to get out and about – and therefore get to a job.

People in Africa with anxiety have to get over it because they have no choice. Don’t you think that perhaps this is a type of illness that would respond better to tough love rather than building a Golden Bridge to long term unemployment?

I wish someone could give me the tools to get past this anxiety and depression so I can get on with my life.

We clearly do not have such tools. Most people in the system today would do better if we did nothing than if we tried to help them.

I’d just love some more support so I can get off my bottom and do something useful.

But you are simply moving the responsibility from yourself to us. If you wait for “support”, whatever that could possibly be, you will be waiting for Godot.

6. Charles Wheeler

The fact that this will drive many severely disabled people back into a life of institutional care with all the costs involved doesn’t seem to have been factored in. Ironically, disabled benefits were initially introduced to enable claimants to live ‘in the community’ because this would be more cost-effective!

Well yes. I am not sure this will be the result but let us hope it is. Institutional care is not pleasant. No one would live there if they had a choice. Thus it works, inadvertently, to sort out the genuine from the less needy and from the fakes. Care in the Community was introduced because it was thought to be cheaper. It was not. It especially was not given the explosion in the numbers of people who claim. If you make it more attractive for people with a range of problems to get money to sit at home, they will shop around for a doctor who says they have the right problem and hence are entitled to benefits. It is inevitable.

8. Nathaniel Mathews

The fact that a person is suffering a serious depression is not helped by having to cope with a badly geared benefits test at a time of recession.

How do you know?

@12 – Yea, fuck people with anxiety. It’s no skin off YOUR nose if they collapse and die, after all. Or end up in expensive long-term care after a mental breakdown. And yea, they’d be dead, not “better”. So by that measure, quite right!

And screw the figures, despite the fact that bills would be FAR higher for institutional care, I’ll just go ahead and claim otherwise! Never mind the fact that those bills are now going to pile up, it doesn’t matter, we need to drive more people into institutions and kill some others!

And how do we know? Those things alien to you, facts. And reason. And anything resembling thought. Say, why the heck are you doing your job for so little, by the way? You’re a good £2.50/hour underpaid. Your boss’s expenses make FASCINATING reading, I’m so pleased I put that FoI request in.

Congratulations to you for your strength of character in helping yourself when others wouldn’t. You are right those people who think people who need benefits are just lazy scroungers or as our illustrious prime minster so often says “Benefit Scroungers” need to have the same unfortunate experiences as all of us who are on them have had. It is truly sad that only after bad luck has befallen people they can see the need what does that say about our society.

While it’s logical that some form of test be applied to see who’s likely to be able to re-enter the workforce (with varying amounts of support / adaptations) and who’s not able to do so, surely it’s also logical that the people most qualified to carry it out are the medical professionals who know an individual’s medical history, rather than private sector medics on a DWP contract which may include an element of payment by results?

How can they fully take into account variable conditions such as CFS, whereby the claimant can appear fully fit one day, but if they work to maximum capacity could be ‘knocked out’ for the following three while they recover? While they would be capable of some work, how many employers would be flexible enough to allow someone to work whatever hours they choose, as long as they put in X hours per week / month? Would anyone at the local JobCentre be able to signpost them to an organisation that could give them tips on suitable employers to approach?

If my previous experiences (over five years ago) with that institution (when I briefly claimed JSA) are anything to go by, they appear to be geared towards the lower end of the socio-economic scale (chefs, warehouse staff, cleaners etc.) and can have problems with well qualified people – one advisor told me of my job search log (which included checking recruitment websites almost daily) that I didn’t need to do as much in order to claim (!)

Of course GPs should be more familaur with a patients need but the Gov’ or ATOS doesnt trust local Doctors or have any confiedence in them ,not only that has anyone tried to get a copy of their records from a surgery ‘under the freedom of information act ‘ only to be told it will cost them £50 …nothings changed under the new laws which are being flouted by both Gps & The Gov’ surely this is illegal

My very own troll!

Thank you so much for the comments, made me smile so much

J W^^W

So much for subtlety

You really take the biscuit my friend.

My insight into the problems with the present WCA are based on my experience as a social welfare solicitor with 20 years’ dealing with benefit cases. Additionally I myself have experienced depression on 3 occasions in the last 10 years that were so debilitating that I was off work for months. Fortunately my boss was understanding, because during those times I often could not get out of bed, and even with my legal knowledge of the system would not have been able to cope with the WCA.

You are entitled to your right wing opinions, of course. What I find inexcusable is that you would express them as comments on a post of someone with a history of serious mental health problems in a manner that is highly critical, if not high-handed, arrogant and mocking.

Fortunately Jenny appears to be taking things in her stride.

I am not surprised that someone apparently without a shred of tact or decency hides their name. Your friends, if you have any, would no doubt be ashamed to be associated with you.

Nathaniel Mathews @ 18

Your friends, if you have any, would no doubt be ashamed to be associated with you.

Apparently not. This guy has been posting this stuff for months and this is not the first person he has taken on himself to personally abuse in an outrageous manner. Unfortunately, the other Tories who infest the blogg are in full agreement with him and have said they see nothing wrong with this type of stuff.

Please remember that among the Tory vermin this type of completely unprovoked attack on the weak is their stock in trade and is no more remarkable than say, a fully grown rat would attack and devour a dying brother or sister. The Tory Party have gave up most of what remained of their conscience years ago and the mask has slipped of completely post election.

You should aim most of your ire at the editors who allow this type of shite to stand completely unmolested. Politics is becoming more and more polorised and we are now at the stage where people need to decide on what side of the line they are on. Politics is now about deceny vs the Tories and we need to make a stand.

Almost half of me agrees with them, insofar as the true face of these scum needs exposed to the widest possible audience, but the decent part of me shades it when it comes to innocent people with mental health issues have to be sacrificed in this fashion.

Thanks for writing, BTW.

To Jenny

I am sorry that you have had to be exposed to SMFS’s torrent of abuse, but let me assure you; there are still people who care. We are not all sociopaths, decency still exists in this Country despite people like IDS et al. We may be in a minority but we are still here.

Good luck.

@18/19 – When you’re paid, it’s amazing what you can come up with.

He’s arguing to disrupt the discussion and make it harder for the left. That’s all.

18. Nathaniel Mathews

What I find inexcusable is that you would express them as comments on a post of someone with a history of serious mental health problems in a manner that is highly critical, if not high-handed, arrogant and mocking.

What have I said that is remotely mocking? Or even critical of Jenny come to that.

That’d be *your posts*.