Civitas Feb 2008 Report : The MIddle Class Do Best In NHS Health UK

Cartoon By Roving UserWatch Toonist : Kakatoo

Class Advantages In Mental Health Systems ?

We will come to the Civitas report a little later - bear with us ... At UserWatch we have often expressed concern about the way the NHS UK mental health system has become populated by extra planned bureacracy such as the National Institute for Mental Health Education (NIMHE) and its changeling form Care Services In Partnership (CSIP) that has favoured a new middle class layer of "User Involvement" - and at over £100 million over four years NIMHE been a diversionary cost to real treatment chances.

Initially the whole aim of NIMHE in the UK was to recruit a top layer of university educated (mainly) ex-Service Users who would then act as the pyramid seller of the new sales-force in mental health to alter its shape to a job creation service, as opposed to a Patient Choice driven treatment service. Terms like "brand" were often used in NIMHE's more concealed meetings .. But the Gov'ts real agenda was to socially engineer through NIMHE - its way .. In the localities amongst gullible service users in 2003 onwards NIMHE had "train the trainer" sessions for Users like some kind of sales teamsanship ....Most were training to "speak" in audiences about NIMHE's aims with a bit of their own experience thrown in .....

"Sometimes it was quite humbling"

Claimed a User who spoke to UserWatch after they had left NIMHE ....

CSIP itself, was inspired not by Users in NIMHE who started to desert it in 2004 -5 but by more somehow freer, middle class "Carer's" (often those who have someone to care for) ... Note that CSIP is now being morphed and recruited directly into the DoH's Strategic Health Authorities - where more money is also very mysteriously wasted ........

The underlying real mental-health-stigma (i.e. treating it prejudicially) by both NIMHE and the Dept of Health was its deeper anti patient-choice stance and its centrally string pulled policies of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for the masses i.e. one size fits all "Layardism"..

New CBT Layardism was thus readied to bolt onto David Freud's more recent stances against Incapacity Benefit - and his new Welfare to Wealth push for more of the admin middle class..

Now Dave ofcourse was himself also shadowing the national charity Sainsbury's Centre For Mental Health's Pathways to Work push formulated in 2002 by SCMH partly by Dr Bobby Grove who seconded into the Dept of Work and pensions on IB matters from SCMH

By 2004 "From Here To Equality" the NIMHE raison d'etre document with its reminders and claims of people on 70+ billion (a year) of Incapacity Benefit was trumpeting pro work "ANTI-STIGMA" - ie. Getting everyone in mental health readied to work - with the social sub agenda that society and employers were to blame for unemployed mental health service users .


Elite ex-Service Users had been advising all of this "anti stigma" to Govt ... Nameable circles of them hovered around the Social Exclusion Unit or other related agencies and had their mates stack up the stats in other related anti stigma projects to create the right impressions that mental health "stigma" by employers was deep and very real ...

Some had morphed with weavery galore in and out of the admin classes and circles of influence of the now very greedy pro government policy ex DOH civil-servant run mental health charities too ...

But we started with the title that the NHS favours the middle class and so it does according to independent research body Civitas in its February 2008 report .. :

[Quote]

The NHS plays to the middle classes who are able to use their sharp elbows. In the words of the new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg MP : "the centralised system has failed for the people who need it the most "

Civitas with this text quoted above is using the context of surgical, coronary care and hip replacements medicine but at UserWatch we know mental health systems and the New Labour NIMHE and Dept of Health led policies have been exploited and even woven at the top by the more able New Labour connected Users as well as exploited Carers from middle class backgrounds. We cannot ignore the costs here and diversion of treatment chances and even costly projects amongst these New Labour elitist circles of Users that diverted money...

The DoH too - we repeat - is influentially too woven into the mental health charities .. Its a class carve up alright .. And we know many names locally and nationally in the UK that shows the mental health system is riddled with an almost unconsciously concealed UK class bias....

The Govt from 2000 onwards socially engineered and planned an anti-patient-choice agenda in mental health and the middle classes cemented it all after NIMHE's first bloom and promises of "innovation" .....

"Oh well its tea, biscuits and cake and talking in the SHA offices then" ...

Said a CSIP operative that one of the UserWatch team overheard .....