The Daily Express is a horrendous little rag anyway, but here, for fun.
It is telling that more than1.1million incapacity claim- ants are not suffering from any physical disability at all, but get their handouts by moaning about problems like “stress” and “depression”.
Once again, the largesse of the welfare system provides perverse incentives for people to exaggerate their emotional suffering rather than demonstrate resilience; no wonder, then, that the number of people saying that they are “too stressed” to work has trebled during the 12 years of Labour rule.
By far the greatest outrage is the money dished out to more than 100,000 alcoholics and drug addicts. It is the height of lunacy and immorality for the state to pay people to continue with their dangerous habits. Awarding “disability” handouts to drug abusers makes a complete mockery of the law, given not only that narcotics are illegal but also that a significant proportion of crime is committed by addicts.
These people deserve spells in prisons, not an easy lifetime on the dole (not sure what’s “easy” about living on £50 a week…). The incapacity benefits system has been disastrous for the moral fibre of our nation.
Ants claiming incapacity benefit is a new one. But I can understand them being off work for stress. Ants work really long hours.
I don’t trust any articles written about benefits that still call them “incapacity benefits”. It is the Employment and Support Allowance now. If someone can’t even use the correct name for the benefit, they have no authority to write in a national paper about it.
Anyway, there you go. I am too knackered and pissed off today for much else. But stop your moaning about potentially fatal illnesses like depression, eh. Demonstrate more resilience. Hang yourself from your good old Birtish stiff upper lip.
I am sick of this bullshit being published. Swap places with someone incapacitated by schizophrenia for a week, you fucking idiots.
Edit: Going to add here, when I was sixteen/seventeen, before I got kicked out of college for being mental and manic, when people thought I’d be destined for Oxford, I used to lie in front of traffic, and think I was Jesus.
Filed under: Bipolar Disorder
Stumble It!
Yes, what the hell is “moral fibre” anyway, and how can a nation have it? This is just another example of how today’s education system has failed, in that it churns out idiots like this, who never reflect on the meaning of what they are saying.
In my day idiots were of far better quality!
Moral fibre is the inner strength to do what you believe to be right in difficult situations. So in the context of a nation, it is a nations strength to try to do the right thing for its citizens who need help…even if it is helping those with a disability that the nation and the majority of it’s citizens don’t understand or are ignorant of.
And to quote “it churns out idiots like this, who never reflect on the meaning of what they are saying”.
Alfred, I’d like to thank you for reinforcing your own thoughts and the thoughts from the article.
Ooh yes, I should be working while attempting to talk myself out of throwing myself off a bridge (I’m succeeding, mostly by sleeping 16 hours a day, and haven’t made it to college for over a week).
The amount of mistakes in that article is funny. The problem is some people can’t see the mistakes and believe the article.
The danger here is that most people form their opinions from the media – we’re in deep shit. But then – I’ve always been neck deep.
**bangs head on keyboard in utter dispair**
I wonder if the ****** who said that would like to say the same to the poor kid who tried to commit suicide outside my Uni Campus yesterday and was taken back to the mental health unit, completely distraught?
God, I hate people sometimes, I really do.
Also, it must be quite depressing being an ant.
Brilliant article, Seaneen. Sometimes I despair because we are SURROUNDED BY STUPID PEOPLE!!!!!! But we have to go on fighting them. (I meant logomachy, not actual fisticuffs.)
Just noticed something – if you click on this prat’s other columns he wrote ‘Why Nick Griffin isn’t fit to Clean Churchill’s Books’ (which if course he is totally right about) and Churchill suffered depression his whole life! Talk about hypocrisy!
Churchill had a collection of dirty books?
Something hideous was said about Stephen Gately, and thousands protested..
Just looked.. they have disabled comments for that article. Wonder why?
Strange coincidence – we were just discussing that article in my “Social Context of Health and Illness” group earlier today…
This is freaking unbelievable.
Yet another odious article by someone who clearly hasn’t researched the ‘facts’ . I haven’t seen the government figures that apparently ‘prove’ that 19/20 incapacity claimants are capable of work but even if I had, I’d regard them in the same way I regard most government statistics – as mostly spurious, ungrounded and slanted to support their current agenda. If statistics are in order then i have a few more at the ready (from the DWP):
‘with almost 20,000 people having been subject to a work-capability assessment up to the end of August, 10% were assessed as suitable for the ESA Support group, 22% have been assessed for the work-related activity group and 69% as fit for work. In addition 38% who claimed ESA between october 08 and February 09 ended their claim before the assessment was completed and of the 4,900 fit for work appeals heard by the end of August, 3,300 were upheld in the DWPs favour’
That doesn’t suggest to me that the government are genorously extending their ‘largesse’ willy-nilly to everyone who comes complaining of a back-twinge or bout of depression. I would love to invite the author of this article to spend a day doing my job advising mental health service users whose lives are being made increasingly difficult and distressing by all this indiscriminate generosity. He could come along to an assessment or an appeal and witness one of the DWPs nasty, bully-doctors systematically break-down and humiliate a few clients for a bit of fun as well while he’s at it.
As for all those evil drug-addicts and lazy alcoholics, he might be pleased to know that the government are slyly attempting to pass legislation (breaching European law) to allow job-centre staff to enforce drug and alcohol dependency tests on suspiscious-looking claimants who will then face sanctions for non-compliance with both the test an subsequent treatment schemes.
Hateful, slandering, ill-researched articles such as this serve only to stir-up and fuel the already troubling climate of resentment and blame towards the sick and disabled that so many of our ‘honest hard-working taxpayers’ seem eager to buy into. On a more selfish note, they also make my job even mor stressful and difficult than it already is.
I like “moral fiber”… it’s so… well, 80ies…
it reeks of the good old evil Tatcherism…
I am following a group called shiftstigma on Twitter and I ‘Tweeted’ all my friends about that article to see if we could get a response like the one to the horrible article about Stephen Gately.
@shiftstigma gave me this link where you can report negative pieces in the media about mental health issues:
http://shift.org.uk/work/media/mediamonitor/respondingtomedia/index.html
Hope that helps
It occurs to me that “Birtish claim ants” is an anagram of “iambic slant shirt.” This may be the secret source of the moral fibre.
responses/comments…
1. Lol. Very very good seaneen. And sorry you’re pissed off today. Actually by the time you read this it is yesterday. oh well.
2. Typical journalist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3. People (whether they be Professionals or Man/woman-In-the-Street or Ants)- will NEVER get it, unless they’ve been there themselves or are seemingly slightly more intelligent and (dare I say it)-caring than your average in-your-face Journalist.
I am a journalist. One who had to take redundancy and early retirement after, a year ago, being so ill with depression. I am on ESA and take this Express line with the derision it deserves. I wish to assure you that “typical” journalists like this are fewer than the comment implies. But the newspaper owners are gasping to instil “fear” as a marketing device.
Years ago I was chair of a large service user group. A woman had killed her husband for raping her – it was all over the news because she was mentally ill having been abused by her father and other male members of her family. A reporter called to group office and asked me if I could provide her with 3 or 4 mentally ill women who had been abused by male members of their family. She was at pains to explain that she could cope with mentally ill women and that she would bring along her 6 week old new borne daughter to help calm any anxious moments during any interviews. I hung up the phone without comment.
Believe me when I say – so called professional journalists will do whatever they need to do – say whatever they need to say – to promote their career.
That article pissed me off too.
I think it’s OK to speak about IB, though. Although ESA is replacing it and, I think, *new* claimants will now go onto it, I believe there’s still millions of folk that are getting IB as the government works through them to switch them to ESA.
I’m still on IB. I was asked to go into my local benefits office and was given the “opportunity” to go onto ESA, which I politely declined.
Does anyone really expect anything different from the media and public at large?
Yes the article is crap, but it is so close to my everyday experiance of living with mentalism that it almost provokes no reaction in me.
Ever tried to say to a debt collection company (through their lawyers) that you are so depressed that you cannot eat not mind deal with the 70 odd page document that they sent to you 7 days previously?
Ever tried to ask a judge for an adjournment for the debt collectors case and have him say that the letter from your community social worker saying that the Court case for the debt collectors would seriously and materially damage your mental health at this time and be told that the letter was not from a suitably qualified medical professional and so in admissable and so the case should proceed?
Ever been fined £30,000 and had your professional qualifications taken away because you wrote a letter when manic and it was consider inappropriate? And then watch a pedophile get fined just £850 and get a repremand with no loss of qualifications by the same professional body after raping 27 children.
Ever been thrown out of your job becuase your professional qualification was taken away and so loose your livelyhood?
Ever had to watch your business that you put everything into stollen from you by your partners and then sit in silence because of a Courts gagging order as they went to everyone you ever knew as told them you were insane?
Every had to work shit minimum wage jobs carrying boxes whilst you watched people you trusted get rich off your back?
Every had to try to fight all of this in the Courts using the DDA and Human Rights and see how you are greeted and how the “normal world” considers mentalism?
Believe me, the article just about sums up the worlds view.
You know, in the US there are certain mental illnesses that insurance companies cover the complications of & some they don’t. One of the ones bot being covered is avoidant personality disorder.
It’s the typical train of thought that insinuates that it’s literally “all in our heads” & that we whine & moan about nothing.
I wish it were nothing, I’ve tried to make it nothing so many times that if it were I’d be sailing right about now.
Think of the journalists who are also sufferers of mental health disorders. There are many and they get treated like everyone else in a job. I wish people would stop stereotyping others – whether by journalists or about them.
Read Polly Toynbee and others. If you keep taking the tabloids (red tops) you will get the ‘journalism ‘you expect.
I dislike the ‘phobe’ nature of present society. As a (recently retired, due to health) journalist, I hope no one will categorise me with yet another stigma. Of being a journalist with mental health issues. Thanks for reading this. And good luck.
[...] the Secret Life of a Manic Depressive puts it, “I am sick of this bullshit being published. Swap places with someone incapacitated by [...]
Well said. The media attacks on people with mental illness really are despicable. Do people like Leo McKinstry work with people like us, see our lives, try to help us in any way? No. He’s nothing but a bigot and a coward.