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(Appologies upfront for this long post, have tried to format for accessability, but feel this is an important context.
Have attached this post as a text (txt) file for ease of quoting on other platforms.)
http://mh.bmj.com/content/41/1/40.full
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https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/fcdf22ca-cac8-45da-a614-fbc5754de037
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https://freepsychotherapynetwork.co...it-claimants-with-mental-health-disabilities/
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https://www.disabilitynewsservice.c...aims-dpos-helped-devise-punitive-work-scheme/
Have attached this post as a text (txt) file for ease of quoting on other platforms.)
Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes
http://mh.bmj.com/content/41/1/40.full
(emphasis added)
Critical medical humanities
Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes
Author affiliations
Abstract
Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an expanding range of job search, training and work preparation activities, as well as mandatory unpaid labour (workfare).
Increasingly, these activities include interventions intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality, notably through the imposition of positive affect. Labour on the self in order to achieve characteristics said to increase employability is now widely promoted.
This work and the discourse on it are central to the experience of many claimants and contribute to the view that unemployment is evidence of both personal failure and psychological deficit.
The use of psychology in the delivery of workfare functions to erase the experience and effects of social and economic inequalities, to construct a psychological ideal that links unemployment to psychological deficit, and so to authorise the extension of state—and state-contracted—surveillance to psychological characteristics.
This paper describes the coercive and punitive nature of many psycho-policy interventions and considers the implications of psycho-policy for the disadvantaged and excluded populations who are its primary targets.
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https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/fcdf22ca-cac8-45da-a614-fbc5754de037
Online Supported Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONS
Value of contract
£21.0m
(emphasis added)The Autumn Statement signalled the Government’s commitment to improving mental health and employment outcomes, building on evidence-based interventions that improve the employment and health prospects for people with common mental health problems.
Research suggests that being out of work for long periods of time is damaging to health, social and financial well-being, and the longer someone is off sick, the harder it is for them to get back to work.
The Mental Health Taskforce, launched in December 2014 and chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, has focused interest particularly on mental health and employment. It recognises mental health is a mainstream issue and the Taskforce asked Government Departments to look at developing new policies that would strengthen the support offered to people with mental health conditions.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Department of Health (DH) collaborated to produce a package of measures.
As a part of these measures, DWP is considering the procurement of online supported Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) provision across the whole of England.
This provision is designed to support people with common mental health conditions to prepare for and move into work, with intervention at the earliest possible point in a claim to benefit or access to the Fit for Work service.
Specifically we would require a supported service (with for example telephone or live online support or online face-to-face therapy), in line with National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) approved treatment.
We anticipate awarding at least two contracts, lasting for approximately two years from the date of commencement. These contracts are expected to begin in early 2016.
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https://freepsychotherapynetwork.co...it-claimants-with-mental-health-disabilities/
Mental health activists, workfare campaigners and therapists protest against work cure therapy for benefit claimants with mental health disabilities
It’s time for the psy professional bodies to stop colluding with the DWP
(emphasis added)For a decade or more, the Government has been deploying psychotherapy to get people with mental health difficulties off benefits, back to work and mapped into the neoliberal labour market.
Since 2010, austerity policies of welfare reform – punitive Work Capability Assessments, benefit cuts, workfare, sanctioning – have intensified government strategies of psycho-compulsion and work cure for welfare claimants.
IAPT therapists are being co-located in Jobcentres, DWP mental health advisers and employment coaches in GP surgeries, food banks, schools and libraries.
The big five national organisations representing the professions of counselling, psychotherapy and clinical psychology* have welcomed these policies and the state funding of back-to-work therapy.
Hundreds of mental health workers accredited by the psy professional bodies have been hired by the DWP to provide “support into work”. These are jobs that are experienced as deeply unethical by many of the professionals being steered into this kind of work.
In March this year, the Mental Wealth Foundation (see below) wrote to the five professional organisations challenging their support of the government’s use of psychological therapies to put pressure on people with mental health disabilities to get into work. You can read the exchange of letters between us and the professional bodies here.
So far, all but one of these organisations are refusing to speak to us and continue to argue that they have had private reassurances from the DWP that “work cure” therapy will not be mandatory for claimants, and will not involve setting entry into employment as a therapeutic outcome.
This claim defies the reality of the DWP’s record of punitive and coercive policies of workfare, Work Capability Assessment and sanctioning and its growing determination through its Work and Health initiatives to prioritise work as the therapy of choice for long-term mental health disability.
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https://www.disabilitynewsservice.c...aims-dpos-helped-devise-punitive-work-scheme/
Boycott call after DWP wrongly claims DPOs helped devise punitive work scheme
Disabled activists have called on disability charities to boycott any further co-operation with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), after it wrongly claimed that disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) had helped draw up its punitive new work scheme.
DWP claimed that DPOs “co-designed” plans to force new claimants of out-of-work disability benefits to take part in its health and work conversation (HWC).
(emphasis added)The DWP’s plans have been described by disabled activists as “DWP skulduggery”, “pernicious”, “oppressive”, “punitive”, and “abusive”.
Details about the HWC, which is already being rolled out across the country, were revealed in slides used at a presentation delivered by two senior DWP civil servants, and seen by DNS.
The two civil servants – Ian Anderson, DWP’s project and programme management head of profession, and Matt Russell, its policy advisor for disability employment strategy – claimed in their presentation that the HWC was “co-designed with the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT), health charities, front-line staff, disabled peoples’ organisations and occupational health professionals”.
(emphasis added)Peter Jackson, Breakthrough UK’s deputy chief executive, accused DWP of a “misrepresentation” of what had taken place at a meeting with other disability organisations in a north London jobcentre about 18 months ago.
He said DWP had asked for feedback on a voluntary scheme in which job coaches would carry out informal conversations with ESA claimants about work and their attitude to employment.
He said: “There was no conditionality to it. It was entirely voluntary. There was no talk of sanctions for people who didn’t want to have that conversation.
“We would not have endorsed or supported anything that had any conditionality or potential sanctioning attached to it because that is completely and fundamentally in conflict with our approach.”
(emphasis added)DR UK was “vehemently opposed both to the current sanctions regime and to any extension of it”, and had made that clear in meetings with ministers and civil servants.
She said DR UK was “consulted but did not agree with the proposal for mandatory work and health conversations”.
Disabled activist Rick Burgess said: “It’s clear the DWP are again acting dishonestly and misleading organisations they consult with. Which reinforces the need to boycott them.
“Hopefully in future, organisations will see this fraud being perpetuated by DWP and refuse involvement.
“The reputational harm done by being involved with the DWP will only grow, so better to get out now and side with disabled people, and not their oppressors.”
A DWP spokesman refused to apologise for the claims by Anderson and Russell that the health and work conversation was co-designed by DPOs, when those organisations had made it clear they were firmly opposed to sanctions, conditionality and a mandatory HWC.