How to claim mental illness benefits

For my newspaper I wrote last week about the rocketing numbers (now more than nine million) of our fellow citizens who are ‘economically inactive’ (aged 16-64, unemployed but not seeking work). Within that category, a fast-growing number (nearly three million) are claiming a range of disability or sickness-related benefits, usually a PIP (personal independence payment). Of these, something between half and three quarters are founding their claims partly or wholly on mental health problems. That number has been growing fast since lockdown, particularly among the young. And it was on the mental health component of this growing burden on our economy that I focused. I explained how a PIP can more than double the standard universal credit benefit. Once granted, the beneficiary is not chased to get a job.

My Times column attracted a fierce response from online readers posting comments. Most agreed, sometimes intemperately, even embarrassingly, scornful about mental illness; but a sizeable minority expressed outrage at what they took to be an attack on the vulnerable. I’m told the response on Twitter/X, too, was stormy. ‘These claimants are not skiving or faking,’ has been my critics’ gist, ‘their distress is real, deep, and disabling. You (Parris) are cruel [/cheap/nasty/ignorant].’

Of course this is all water off a duck’s or columnist’s back, but still I find readers’ responses interesting. So many in this case take themselves to be in an almost Manichaean combat with one or the other ‘side’. Yet the deeper one digs, the more one realises how much common ground there is between the two. To locate this ground, though, you have to start from an important assumption that those of the ‘we’re-becoming-a-nation-of-spongers’ tendency will resist. The assumption is this: most people, including most benefits claimants, do not believe that their claims are dishonest.