Liz KendallThe Work and Pensions Secretary suggested sending it earlier this month employment coaches for mental health hospitals Encouraging patients to return to work. This policy is rife with bias and ultimately reinforces the stereotype that mental illness is something you can easily recover from. This means that if you look ‘good’ physically you can work.

The rationale for this proposed policy is that 21.5% of those aged 16-60 are currently “economically inactive” and disability benefits bills are increasing. The government—or perhaps the country—cannot afford it; Therefore, the aim is to encourage those who benefit from disability benefits, including those who suffer from disability benefits. sanity Conditions for re-entering the workforce.

There is so much wrong with this idea that it’s hard to know where to start, but we should start by exploring how physical and mental health are valued in different and damaging ways.

There are around 42 million people aged 16-60 in the UK. 21.5% of this number is around 9 million who are economically inactive. according to King’s FundThere are approximately 17,000 mental health beds, accounting for only 0.1% of this economically inactive population. Although not every mental health bed is filled by someone in this age range, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is.

These 17,000 mental health beds are currently occupied by the sickest patients who are unable to work. We don’t send job coaches into hospital wards full of patients recovering from heart attacks, strokes, cancer or surgery, and the mere thought of doing so would be unreasonable. So why is it acceptable to target our most vulnerable mental health patients? This policy actively targets those least likely to return to work anytime soon, which is frankly disgusting.

This is a problem in itself, given the magnitude of the mental health epidemic in the UK, when we focus on the small proportion of people who even have access to a mental health bed. The fact that the government plans to target this pool of people is incredibly specific (it’s a very small portion of the group that is not economically active) and the impact will be incredibly small.