The ESA debate

Recently I read a short article online about the debate and ping pong of the bill to cut the money to people on ESA who were in the work related activity group. It mentioned that people were simply not speaking up about the problems because they were too busy dealing with everyday life to find the time.

Now I freely admit that I have not been following this nor know what was in the rest of the speech or even if I have quoted it properly but in all honesty it only matters in that it spiked my feelings. I don’t spend my time religiously following the news, signing petitions and writing to my MP on all matters relating to the treatment of people on sickness benefit, or those who have been seeking work.

 It is in fact a positive choice to avoid distressing and disturbing emotions and though I feel quite ashamed that I do not play more of a part in trying to get a fair hearing and outcome in such matters it just distresses and upsets me too much. The whole idea of standing up for myself scares me as well as frustrates me. To me it seems a hopeless battle where I am wasting my time in something that will never have any influence over the outcome.

I am, of course, immensely grateful to those who can fight this fight as I do believe it needs to be fought. I just can’t do it myself. I have in fact got higher priorities and though I guess many would not understand it, I put keeping me in a stable state of wellness above my ability to live above the poverty line. You may well consider this a mistake but as a therapist often said to me when I complained about other peoples treatment of me the only person I can change is myself and since I do not believe what I say will make a blind bit of difference to the outcome I am content to do things when I feel able.

So why am I writing this if that is how I feel?

Because it upset me, because in fact it angered me to feel that at least one of the house of lords felt that it was necessary to make the point, that people are really busy trying to live their everyday lives to speak up. I felt it a slap in the face to all that I have been trying to achieve. I felt my efforts to get me back to work and off benefits completely lost on politicians as a whole. And though they may feel that I am not the norm, I fear that they are so out of touch it is frightening. And today I guess it was one of those days when I was stirred by that fear, from striving to get well long enough to write something.

I have grown up believing that the benefits system is not so much about what is fair or could be justified but about benevolence.

The benevolence of a nation towards all it’s members, a nation that is standing up and saying when you need a little help it will be there for you. These days I feel very much that this principle has gotten lost in fear. I feel it has resulted in a widespread belief that each person is out for themselves and that we have to guard the pot of money from those who would steal, defraud or rig the outcome for their own ends. It seems to me that there is a certain paranoia that you can never have enough money. It also appears that the more people individually can hoard, the more they feel they will need. In the same way the deficit coming down seems more an aversion to debt or dependency on nations that will not honour the needs of nations who need help, than it does about the nations stability.

That aside the guiding principle to help each and every member who fell on hard times has brought about a need in the population to believe that people deserve the help. We must be sure that they do in fact deserve what us hard tax paying people are giving up and that we can punish those who cannot justify themselves.

To me benevolence isn’t really about what you or I deserve as much as it’s about the desire to help those in need. Fairness and whether people deserve something is about circumstances.

How can you put a figure on whether someone is looking for a job effectively? Applying for jobs they have no hope of getting to prove they have tried is not effective, it’s ridiculous yet so many are asked how many jobs they have applied for.

In the same way proceeding with talking therapy or drug treatments because it shows they’ve tried doesn’t really take into account whether it’s helpful to them. In the same way just because aids are available doesn’t really mean that they are going to help this person. One person may have a hoarding problem but not all hoarding services are the same nor as affective.

But I guess my real concern is about how politicians and the general public see the people who are going to be affected by the changes to ESA.

There is a par to me that feels they have lost sight of who these people are and more particularly what they have been through to get to where they are. I have been ill for a long time and I have met and spoken to a large number of people with mental health problems and though this may only be a tiny proportion of those who are ill my impressions of these people and their lives have left me feeling such sympathy for them.

I have heard about abuse, verbal, physical and sexual, of neglect, of chronic isolation, emotion distance from parents, of children looking after parents, threatening environments, abusive relationships, people who’ve lived with abuse for years and people who’ve been through short spates. I have listened to stories so truly disturbing and frightening I can’t image how they got through them but they did. The ramifications of which can take years to surface in the myriad of ways that mental health problems do.
I cannot imagine how people can be so callous to each other and yet I have seen enough to know the truth of it. So when they are broken and need help I find it intolerable that they should have to fight so damned hard to get it and sometimes even harder to keep it once they have found what works.

We all have ups and downs and it would be unfair to say that it is just those with mental health problems who need help with their emotions but quite frankly I would rather help people become healthy than I would punish people because they didn’t do it as fast as you thought they would or because they had a problem with something that you didn’t.

So I would say please, please remember that mental health problems are not bacterial infections, are not viruses, they are not soley caused by a persons genetics, they are a result of experiences and a persons perceptions of their experiences as well. As such you are dealing with a huge number of people who have suffered extreme distress either through physiological and emotional disturbance. And though they may have been apparently well for much of their life these can be long term or short term and they deserve our sympathy.

To me it is simply not good enough to say that you have coped or gotten well and so this person in front you should too. They are not you and they did not live your life or see it the way you did. And though you may not see it nor understand the problems when explained they are suffering so much that they got ill, ill enough despite the stigma to ask for help.


And since I have written far too much I will save my comments on why people with illness returning to work need the extra money for the next post. 

But please when you think about the cuts remember the people, and what they have been through because mental health isn’t simply about the now. It’s about all the things that went before that, that were distressing, disturbing, downright frightening and damaging that finally overwhelmed the person.