KitNotes

To me, it boils down to a question of agency. Who decides? Is it your doctor? Or the person who works down the Job Centre? No offence to people who work at JobCentres - it must be one of the toughest jobs going - but they are not qualified to make medical judgements about people, especially when they’re constantly told to get JSA and IB numbers down to make sure the government looks good. Usually this involves shoving people into low paid jobs which are totally unsuitable, and to hell with that person’s mental health. There are quotas, damnit!

Again, I find myself asking: who benefits? It’s certainly not those people affected by mental health issues. Maybe we’ve finally accepted that stress is a legitimate condition, but I think we’re (when I say we, I mean wider society) are affected by the old Victorian taboos surrounding mental heath, and the image of all people with mental health issues either being locked up in a padded cell or being driven around on a Sunshine Coach. It’s this sort of prejudice which still haunts - like a spectre - over current attitudes to mental health, and a rare few positive representations in happy-go-lucky TV films won’t change that.

We are still told to think, from my experience anyway, that people with mental health issues are ‘modern day lepers’. Which is why I think we see such authoritarian, dogmatic and Victorian attitudes towards it in such legislation. Either there is nothing wrong with you, or it’s off to the asylum. There is only black or white. No middle ground.

I remember leading SWPer Colin Barker telling me an unusual story about the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland. He told me that those working in mental health institutions reported that when Solidarity was on the retreat, the institutions were full of working class people, but when Solidarity was on the rise, they would check themselves out, and ended up being replaced by the Stalinist bureaucrats. I can’t verify the vaildity of that story, but it’s interesting to note the class context.