If the Tories really cared about mental health they would stop scoring cheap points Micha Frazer-Carroll

cAnd do we all stop complaining about being miserable and just get on with it? That seemed to be the gist of Mel Stride’s recent comments about the state of the country’s ongoing mental health crisis. The mainstream conversation is around mental health, according to the Work and Pensions Secretary Maybe it’s gone too far‘, which led to people diagnosing what he considers to be the ‘normal ups and downs of life’.

To make matters worse for those of us experiencing mental health problems, in the same interview the minister unveiled a new and dangerous plan to Pushing 150,000 people back to work under ‘mild’ conditions. It’s really very good for our well-being, he argued.

There is virtually no evidence to support Stride’s sweeping claims, which scapegoat people with disabilities and barely disguise a cold-hearted government cost-cutting measure. While we may all be able to describe elements of work that help us feel good – for example, camaraderie with colleagues, or a sense of purpose – work is also responsible for much of our suffering in contemporary life.

In 2022-23, 822,000 UK workers reported work-related stress, depression and anxiety. Currently, one in four British workers are in ‘low-quality work’, or, to put it less euphemistically, ‘low-quality employment’.bad work”. Given these circumstances, it is extremely detrimental to people’s well-being to put them into work when they are not ready or able to do so.

As a result, mental health user groups have been protesting return-to-work initiatives for decades. Take the Mental Health Resistance Network, which in 2015 opposed a government pilot that would station therapists in job centers, describing the move as “forced treatment” for benefit recipients. The group wrote: “We should not be pressured to look for work unless we feel able to do so. The competitive, profit-driven and exploitative nature of the modern workplace is not suitable for people whose mental health is vulnerable.”

And yet there is an intimate historical relationship between mental health and the economy, with the state deciding who is considered “legitimately ill,” and moving people in and out of that category in accordance with economic demands. In 2009, after the economic crisis, ‘workfare’ came to Britain, a Victorian workhouse-style scheme that sent benefit recipients on a mandatory (and of course unpaid) ‘journey back to work’.

When it comes to “treating” our mental health, money has long been the most important consideration. We can see this in the government’s emphasis on the mental health crisis as primarily a financial burden, and in the NHS’s ever-increasing focus on cost-effective treatments, such as medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, which quickly gets people back on the production line.

As a result, we must be highly critical of the ways in which economically motivated ministers diagnose and treat the problem of widespread suffering. This also applies to Stride’s comments about people self-diagnosing mental health issues. This is something that young people in particular are often criticized for, with critics suggesting that we are over-pathologizing ourselves. Millennials and Generation Z are often portrayed as work-shy, or as becoming unemployed because we fail to pull ourselves together or accept the demands of modern life, rather than a ‘real’ illness.

But in the field of mental health, the definition of ‘disease’ has always been highly contested and shaped by the political world – most crucially the extent to which our distress affects our productivity. The word “work” appears nearly 400 times in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (a tool often used for psychiatric diagnoses), reiterating the extent to which mental illness is defined by its impact on the marketplace. Considering this, we should support efforts to reassert agency over how we define our own mental distress, as well as how we choose to respond to it.

Regarding the latter, people with lived experience of mental health issues and problems can tell you what they need. It is certainly not about more demonization of people with disabilities, who have endured decades of accusations of ‘scrounging’ and ‘malingering’ to get state support in a failing system. Nor is it taking away these benefits, which provide a crucial lifeline for many people experiencing mental health problems. A friend who has supported people with disabilities through benefit applications told me: “It’s so hard for people to get everything in order… the evidence, the support, the applications, the appeals… it’s a complete insult to say it’s is too easy to get benefits. So many people are suffering and dying because of the system.”

Rather than taking away life-saving support, there is an urgent need to address the causes of mental illness. According to the mental health user collective Restore to the trash“Unacceptable social and economic conditions”, including poor housing, poverty, deteriorating working conditions, discrimination, racist social institutions, rising homelessness rates, strained public services and of course a punitive benefits system, are all demonstrably damaging to people’s mental health.

The Work and Pensions Secretary talks about the ‘normal ups and downs of life’, but there is nothing normal about the decades of neoliberal austerity that have decimated communities and left many people behind. The conditions we currently live in are insane, and taking away benefits and entering low-paid, precarious work will not provide any respite from this. It’s not the mental health conversation that has gone “too far,” but more than a decade of policies that harm the most marginalized and then punish us for suffering.

• Micah Frazer-Carroll is the author of Mad World: The Politics of Mental Healthavailable from Pluto Press

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