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Employment Must Not Be the Aim of Mental Health Treatment (Huffington Post UK article)

Kyla

ᴀɴɴɪᴇ ɢꜱᴀᴍᴩᴇʟ
Messages
721
Location
Canada
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-jay-watts/mental-health_b_10769174.html?edition=uk

excerpt:
Employment Must Not Be the Aim of Mental Health Treatment
04/07/2016 10:13 | Updated 12 hours ago
  • Dr Jay Watts Clinical Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Academic.
Therapy is about reducing suffering, right? Living a fuller life? Not according to current moves to place employment as a central aim of therapy. How come this move is so damaging? Why will so many of us activists and therapists be protesting outside the New Savoy conference on Tuesday, the conference that hopes to set the agenda for the next wave of mental health reform?

In recent years, the government has started to use psychology to get people off benefits, and back to work. In 2006 an economist, Lord Layard, published The Depression Report, an attempt to justify a new wave of therapy for the masses through cost-benefit analysis, the argument the government would actually save money in the long term. Though in many ways a brilliant strategic move, the coupling of saving money with mental health outcomes has become acceptable in a way we would not see with, for example, cancer treatment. We do not, would not, hear that chemotherapy is worth funding because it helps the public purse through getting people back to work. The emphasis is rather on quality of life and the reduction of suffering, precisely the kind of outcomes mental health service users are most interested in. Yet these ideas are not challenged in mental health because of the ongoing link between mental distress and moral failure, or failure to have sufficient willpower...
 

Snow Leopard

Hibernating
Messages
5,902
Location
South Australia
I would like to add a caveat. I agree with the commentary above, but would like to add that I wish employment outcomes were a standard objective measure in studies in psychiatry. If we use that on PACE it becomes FAIL.

I agree - but for a different reason - it will show that such interventions do not lead to employment changes - so the justification for such therapies to increase employment (as per the article in question) is eliminated.
 

alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
I agree - but for a different reason - it will show that such interventions do not lead to employment changes - so the justification for such therapies to increase employment (as per the article in question) is eliminated.
Yes, that is a direct implication of what I am saying. Objective outcome measure are needed to prevent psychobabble claims being taken seriously. I think some percentage of people with some problems may be helped ... but I think it is small. In any case if we had evidence, hard evidence, then pie-in-the-sky claims could be directly countered.
 
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alkt

Senior Member
Messages
339
Location
uk
the only people who may be helped back into working life are those who are only suffering from a lack of self confidence after a period of unemployment. as for where these benevolent employers who would actually take on people with chronic health problems they probably live in the same cloud cuckoo land that the dwp s policy makers live in . certainly not the world i have observed.
 

taniaaust1

Senior Member
Messages
13,054
Location
Sth Australia
the only people who may be helped back into working life are those who are only suffering from a lack of self confidence after a period of unemployment. as for where these benevolent employers who would actually take on people with chronic health problems they probably live in the same cloud cuckoo land that the dwp s policy makers live in . certainly not the world i have observed.

here in Australia they try to get around this by the disability job agencies which help the disabled to find jobs, they often encourage the person to do cleaning contract work in the belief that the person who has ME/CFS can choose their own better times to work and say "oh you can cancel out then when you are sicker and just make it another time'

of cause that doesnt work well and just causes a huge amount of stress from all the cancelations ones does and then the work to get throu just gets more and more as the cancel jobs get added to the others
 

panckage

Senior Member
Messages
777
Location
Vancouver, BC
Wow sounds like religion. Religion no longer uses God to explain lightning. Now it looks like psychiatry is giving up on its assertion that it can get people back to work :)