The Student Room Group

Sanctions for ESA claimants. Tories targetting disabled people again.

Just read this article.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10964125/Tories-discuss-stripping-benefits-claimants-who-refuse-treatment-for-depression.html

Consider this. Disabled people can already be sanctioned for not trying hard enough to find work. Now they have to remain in good mental health at all times to attend all appointments for cognitive therapy else they get their benefits sanctioned.

This is not a fair policy. Disabled people are having to jump though more hoops then those on Job Seekers Allowance.

The Conservative Government has been on a mission since 2010 to dramatically reduce the living standards of disabled people and drive nearly all of them into poverty.

Lets name some recent cuts shall we.

Tories trying to close the Independent living fund.
Tories reforming disabled student allowance.
Tories changing DLA to PIP.
Tories changing IB to ESA.
Tories creating the bedroom tax.
Tories cutting council tax support.

i COULD GO ON BUT THIS SURVEY SAYS IT ALL.

http://www.poverty.ac.uk/report-disability-government-cuts-benefits/benefit-cuts-%E2%80%98hitting-disabled-people-hardest%E2%80%99

So if you have a disabled family member or friend think about what their lives are going to be like with 5 more years of the Conservative Government. And think about yourselves too. You could become disabled.

The future for those outside London is very bleak. Expect to be working for the basic level of benefits. You may as well call yourself a slave if the Tories get in office for the next term.

Look forward going to the food bank when you can and eating Asda Smartprice Beans & Toast yum yum.
And you be grateful for that food and salute the hard working tax payer!! Or we'll have you! We'll get you.
You better turn up for your Job center interview, do your work related training, attend the job hunting workshop, do your 40 hour unpaid workfare job and spend 35 hours a week looking for work or we will SANCTION you! It is perfectly acceptable that you work 84 hours a week including weekends.
A 12 hour shift per day of jolly hard work will do you good. Your have no time to think and be our slave forever.


And if you dare miss a appointment for cognitive therapy to stop you getting depressed expect a sanction!

We are the Conservatives. Making a fairer Britain for everyone. Vote for us and remember how bad it was during Labours reign of Government. Disabled people where healthy and passing people by in the streets. This was terrible!

Don't let Labour do this again!
(edited 9 years ago)

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Reply 1
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Original post by Martyn*
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ah ok will fix the links thank you
Original post by illegaltobepoor
Just read this article.
]


This is something that governments have looked at before. It has always been seen as too hard and may be again.

Personally I would start with making GP's lives a lot more difficult first. GPs continue to sign off tens of thousands of people with stated conditions that are treatable, yet with barely any treatment provided. In a sense it is a conspiracy between them and their patients against the taxpayer. The doctor signs the sick notes, the patient makes little call on the doctor's services.

A sick note for any treatable condition should be accompanied by a treatment plan to get the patient back into the workforce with contingencies if the first treatment does not work. As far as the patient is concerned, he or she should have to accept and fulfil that treatment plan or get another doctor willing to sign off on a different treatment plan. However treatment plans should be subject to the normal provisions about medical competency; so "prescribe anti-depressants on a repeat prescription indefinitely" isn't acceptable and be subject to peer review by a DWP doctor. So long as the doctor can justify what he is doing, then the claimant/patient won't be hassled if he/she does what their own doctor prescribes. However, I think create that regime and a lot of GPs will get a lot tougher with their patients.
Original post by nulli tertius
This is something that governments have looked at before. It has always been seen as too hard and may be again.

Personally I would start with making GP's lives a lot more difficult first. GPs continue to sign off tens of thousands of people with stated conditions that are treatable, yet with barely any treatment provided. In a sense it is a conspiracy between them and their patients against the taxpayer. The doctor signs the sick notes, the patient makes little call on the doctor's services.

A sick note for any treatable condition should be accompanied by a treatment plan to get the patient back into the workforce with contingencies if the first treatment does not work. As far as the patient is concerned, he or she should have to accept and fulfil that treatment plan or get another doctor willing to sign off on a different treatment plan. However treatment plans should be subject to the normal provisions about medical competency; so "prescribe anti-depressants on a repeat prescription indefinitely" isn't acceptable and be subject to peer review by a DWP doctor. So long as the doctor can justify what he is doing, then the claimant/patient won't be hassled if he/she does what their own doctor prescribes. However, I think create that regime and a lot of GPs will get a lot tougher with their patients.


Jesus. Imagine this in the hands of the corrupt, sociopathic, incompetant IDS. Access to medications. The unemployed and sick would be pilled up to their eyeballs on antidepressants and tranquilizers. And they can't make cannabis legal.
Reply 5
Original post by nulli tertius
This is something that governments have looked at before. It has always been seen as too hard and may be again.

Personally I would start with making GP's lives a lot more difficult first. GPs continue to sign off tens of thousands of people with stated conditions that are treatable, yet with barely any treatment provided. In a sense it is a conspiracy between them and their patients against the taxpayer. The doctor signs the sick notes, the patient makes little call on the doctor's services.

A sick note for any treatable condition should be accompanied by a treatment plan to get the patient back into the workforce with contingencies if the first treatment does not work. As far as the patient is concerned, he or she should have to accept and fulfil that treatment plan or get another doctor willing to sign off on a different treatment plan. However treatment plans should be subject to the normal provisions about medical competency; so "prescribe anti-depressants on a repeat prescription indefinitely" isn't acceptable and be subject to peer review by a DWP doctor. So long as the doctor can justify what he is doing, then the claimant/patient won't be hassled if he/she does what their own doctor prescribes. However, I think create that regime and a lot of GPs will get a lot tougher with their patients.


A GPs priority should always be their patients wellbeing and should have absolutely nothing to do with a bunch of unqualified smug twatty little tories and their vindictive twatishness.
(edited 9 years ago)
i agree wholeheartedly

As someone whose suffered from mental illness

ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO IMPROVE WITHOUT MEDICAL HELP

( however theres a line between laziness / and mental health blocking ability to seek treatment)
Original post by n00
A GPs priority should always be their patients wellbeing and should have absolutely nothing to do with a bunch of unqualified smug twatty little tories and their vindictive twatishness.


But that isn't what patients want.

When patients are assessed by doctors and nurses who are strangers, their invariable response is to say, "Ask my GP, he/she knows me best".

Yet there is an enormous mismatch both in the case of musculo-skeletal injuries and mental health problems between how GPs are reporting for benefit purposes and how they are treating or not treating.
Guys may I have your attention for a moment.

This is by design.

There is no doubt those who are on benefits will become depressed more faster than those working.

If a person is on ESA-WRAG or Job Seekers Allowance they are subject to compulsory workfare, vocational training, job search skill training, job searching and job centre interviews. After a year of 12 hour shifts a day with no rest & rubbish pay; people on Job Seekers Allowance might become depressed. If they do then they will be given mental health therapy and as Moosferatu says "pilled up to their eyeballs on antidepressants and tranquilizers". And if they miss the mental health therapy because they where depressed they get sanctioned! Fair system? Not!

This policy is none other than a way to get rid of the workfare slaves who cannot function.
Anti-depressants don't really work. They just hide your real feelings under a artificial hum of chemicals. And no one really gets better on anti-depressants. They actually get worse since the main condition is left untreated. I can't see IDS or the DWP spending huge amounts of money on social counselling for people who are depressed. They would prefer the cheaper method.

Feeling depressed? Don't see the point in living any more? It's okay the job centre will help you! We'll squeeze every last bit of economic worth out of you by Dr IDS injecting you with a multitude of funny farm jabs to make into a mindless slave that stacks shelves at Poundland.
And while your suffering in misery and gradually fading away we at the DWP can't wait till you make a mistake like not attend a mental health therapy session because we'll sanction you for life and throw you on the scrap heap.


Vote Tory!
(edited 9 years ago)
Underlying this policy is a touchingly innocent belief that people with mental illness can simply be cured quite easily with a bit of CBT.
Original post by Old_Simon
Underlying this policy is a touchingly innocent belief that people with mental illness can simply be cured quite easily with a bit of CBT.


Conservatism can cure any illness.

How? By getting a third party company like ATOS to modify a benefit claimants form and then starve the disabled person of any help support or financial means. And then the disabled person dies.

So no more illness! See Conservatism works!

In the good old days if you where poor, you got ill and you died!
And now poor people think they have some entitlement right to be cured!
I say privatise the NHS!
That is what this country needs!

More heartless people like IDS, GIDEON & CAMERON.
(edited 9 years ago)
Reply 11
Original post by nulli tertius
But that isn't what patients want.


walob
Original post by Old_Simon
Underlying this policy is a touchingly innocent belief that people with mental illness can simply be cured quite easily with a bit of CBT.

Pretty much. The people that come up with **** like this clearly have never had any kind of mental health problem. People should be accepting the help they're given, but missing an appointment or two shouldn't stop people from getting their ESA. Even worse is trying to force people that have mental health problems into work.
Original post by Old_Simon
Underlying this policy is a touchingly innocent belief that people with mental illness can simply be cured quite easily with a bit of CBT.


Which is the reason other ministers have steered well away from this.

Medical attention has to be given by the patient's own doctors. Madness (and litigation) lies anywhere else.

As I indicated the key thing is that what doctors say to the DWP must stop being treated as "a little white lie" that doesn't count for anything. The culture of accepting what patients say for the purposes of benefits but not for the purpose of clinical care needs to stop. Doctors say that to contradict patients would damage their relationship with them, but that relationship does not justify what amounts to complicity in widespread fraud.

If the patient says that she is unable to leave the house, her GP agrees with that but all he has done is issue repeat prescriptions for happy juice for the last 5 years and reports to the DWP (probably having barely seen her in that time), then the GP should be having an interview without biscuits before the GMC at the DWP's bidding regardless of whether the patient thinks he is marvelous.

The reality is of course that the doctor does not believe (perhaps with good grounds) that the patient is that seriously ill. If he did, she would have had a psychiatric referrral years before. Likewise there are people signed off with bad backs and bad knees for years who have never had an MRI scan.
[QUOTE=NathanW18;48564996Even worse is trying to force people that have mental health problems into work.

There are tens of thousands of people with mental health problems in work. Why should possessing any medical condition make work optional for those able to do it?
One of my mates went into hospital with a collapsed lung, while on a workfare placement. When he returned to placement the boss told him he was "going to make his life hell" for skipping his unpaid work.

This system is deliberately and cunningly rotten to it's very core and it's disgusting to see how little everyone cares. People simply smile that they pay less in tax and walk on. I have no time for people who vote conservative and turn a blind eye to this.
Original post by nulli tertius
There are tens of thousands of people with mental health problems in work. Why should possessing any medical condition make work optional for those able to do it?


Yes, but mental health problems (like most illnesses) vary in severity and those who can work do but a large proportion of people with mental health problems can't work.
Original post by SmallTownGirl
Yes, but mental health problems (like most illnesses) vary in severity and those who can work do but a large proportion of people with mental health problems can't work.


Evidence please. Thousands upon thousands of claimants with mental health issues fail the Work Capability Assessment every year. Many of those appeal. The success rate on appeals is around 40% (all conditions). That would indicate that there are thousands of people with mental health conditions who can work but don't.
Original post by nulli tertius
Evidence please. Thousands upon thousands of claimants with mental health issues fail the Work Capability Assessment every year. Many of those appeal. The success rate on appeals is around 40% (all conditions). That would indicate that there are thousands of people with mental health conditions who can work but don't.


Yes, because ATOS is definitely right is all cases... Many people don't have the energy to appeal.
Let me guess... The government will send everyone off to 6 sessions of CBT or give them do-it-yourself worksheets and then wonder why it doesn't work.

My own experience with mental health problems involved me repeatedly begging the local NHS for suitable treatment. Despite the best efforts of some of their staff and my GP, I was offered nothing that was helpful or found myself on 12-18 month waiting lists. I tried to get help through the job centre and then via the work programme to find paid or voluntary work, but they wouldn't touch me beyond offering to send me to CV workshops or basic numeracy/literacy courses. So the government let me sit on my arse claiming benefits of around £9k a year (£12.5k for the year I claimed housing benefit). In the end I lost my patience and sought private treatment. It cost £5,000 over two years. The government could have potentially saved themselves a lot of cash if they had offered me access good quality treatment several years ago.

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