http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-jay-watts/mental-health_b_10769174.html?edition=uk
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excerpt:
Employment Must Not Be the Aim of Mental Health Treatment
04/07/2016 10:13 | Updated 12 hours ago
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?
- Dr Jay Watts Clinical Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Academic.
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...