Half of PIP recipients suffer from poor mental health. Rather than try to fix the causes, Sunak appears to believe stripping away support for PIP claimants will miraculously spur them back to work. Framing the reforms as “giving back hope” to people who had lost all “dignity and meaning” fails to acknowledge that for most PIP claimants, depression and anxiety is a secondary condition and often complex. And, for many, conditions that can be directly linked to the stress his predecessors policies are responsible for.
From the perspective of someone who has been in organisations providing free to low cost counselling to locals, this is a familiar pattern: a client might come in needing help with issues relating to past trauma. If we could help them process and address that, they might be able to go forward feeling less burdened in the future.
Then they'd get a letter telling them of an upcoming benefits assessment/review date, and their anxiety would skyrocket. Which is natural given the terrible, broken, dehumanising nature of the system they have to deal with.
We'd then spend weeks in counselling now focused on mostly trying to help them manage the anxiety caused by the assessment/review. They wouldn't be able to focus on anything else - no mental or emotional capacity to do that. And so meanwhile working on their other issues would stall.
And like many mental health charities with incredibly full and long waiting lists to manage, we could only offer a limited number of sessions to each person in total. So that would be the loss of a large chunk of time in which other progress could have been made.
Very frustrating for everyone involved, and not least the client, who bravely came seeking help to tackle those other long-standing issues in the first place!
And that was the pattern even before all these awful new changes were mooted.
