This report is an absolute joke. It’s a report that focuses on the soaring rates of disability post COVID, with 0 mentions of Long COVID, something that has affected millions, and reportedly disabled hundreds of thousands according to the government’s own statistics.
But they prefer to blame it on “mental health” so they can claim it’s the person’s fault and they just need to “try harder”, which seems to be labour’s stance amid benefits cuts.
Capitalism loves to point at mental health - especially after spending decades shaping public views and systemic approaches mental health to be a personal defect and issue.
9x out of 10 psychopathology done thoroughly rather than just ticking off some symptoms in the DSM/ICD identifies above psychological or biological factors the main factor in mental health struggles is sociological.
Simply put: society is depressing people, society is making people anxious… And behind all that it is capitalism that dictates that success and survival is based on ability to produce. And if you fail to produce the whole system is stacked against you to reduce your ability to function mentally.
For folks interested in this I highly recommend checking out Lucy Johnson of the BPS (British Psychological Society)'s Power Threat Meaning Framework for a radical new way to see mental health.
Work kills. Those it doesn’t immediately finish off are made mentally ill. Only a society without Work would be a well and healthy society.
Of course we’ve all got mental health problems. Our economy is entirely oriented around paying us to service bullshit and then going “what I don’t understand” when we have economic problems. Maybe if we get a few thousand more engineers to spend their entire careers pushing numbers with no intrinsic value around that’ll fix the problem.
And then in Scotland, we’ve got shit like this happening.
TL;DR - Forth Valley NHS has discontinued their Adult ADHA and Autism assessment program. Children are aging out of the waiting list for youth, and landed with the option to go private. I have a friend who didn’t make the cut-off, when he rang up to ask what he should do, as he isn’t able to afford a private assessment. He was told to call the Samaritans. The fucking Samaritans. SMFH I’m “lucky”. I live in the East Lothian/Edinburgh catchment area. I’ve been on the waiting list for ADHD assessment since November 2022, when I called in early February this year I was told I was told that the system had been slightly streamlined. My new projected wait time is 5-6 years. Which, to be fair, is better than the 7-9 years it was when I called in November last year.
This is simple practical advice to help individuals dealing with their current problems. I’m not suggesting the nhs is ok or anything:
Speak to your GP and ask to be referred to a provider under the ‘Right To Choose’ scheme. You might be unlucky again, but I know for certain that people in another area of the country with extremely poor healthcare got assessed (via various forms and an online assessment - so local availability of services might not be a problem) in around about a year.
Sadly it looks like the Right to Choose scheme is for England only.
Turns out Tories purposefully trying to kill the NHS for decades, having the worst run COVID response strategy in Europe, making everything unaffordable, turning rivers into literal shit and destroying jobs might be stressful to the point young people become mentally ill. And of course, the right answer to that is to punish them even more.
If only there was something you could do against mental health issues as a government.
