Mental Health : Has NIMHE's SHIFT Gone To SHxT ?

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SHIFT with its anti-stigma in mental health policy thrusts - was created by the Dept Of Health (UK) and the National Institute For Mental Health in England .

Who created NIMHE ? - It appears the DOH and Sainsbury's Centre For Mental Health (SCMH) did since SCMH registered the NIMHE website itself in 2001 .. It is strange that a national Charity like SCMH should be doing that for the Dept of Health isnt it ? Its never been answered why that happened . (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE)





Its also likely that people close to ex Prime Minister Tony Blair and his love of all things american (NIMH - in the U.S.) helped the UK version of NIMHE into existence ..

SHIFT which came later (2005 - 6 ) though was just part of set of ideas that was guided by a mental health "anti-stigma" policy thrust to get people back to work who were suffering mental health problems .. The anti stigma thrust SHIFT was to follow, was formulated by several mental health charities : Mind, Rethink, Mental Health Foundation, and it was hinged into an economic model that placed a priority on getting mental health Users (MH Users) back into work .

The MH charities in the UK and the big engine of them all SCMH , set about trying to convince society that society itself was a serious problem in stigma terms to MH Users gaining work and yet for years they deliberately missed the discriminative way MH Users were not given equivalence of Patient Choice of some treatments, or consultants or hospitals that the general populace were given in other areas of medicine and care .

Patient Choice of treatment etc , and real empowerment like that was not their real priority.

Funding and growth was and that was not going to be a problem with a Government eager to hear their combined voices of advice of how to set up mental health Users to get them back to work .

Pretty soon in 2006 and 2007 both Rethink and Mind had their own Day Centres re-oriented to work and task based regimes for Users . At UserWatch we heard about it all . Patient Choice with its real degree of self determination was subsumed under ideas of Patient's having a voice but not one that was going to create serious choices otherwise maybe many within its empowered direction would have walked away from the mental health charity day centres too .

"Anti-Stigma" was thus skewed towards work and disability discrimination for purposes of saving Govt from paying out Incapacity Benefits (IB) - and we would argue perpetuating the charities interests alongside creating the new bureacractic job creation NIMHE, which from 2004 - 9 cost over £100 million .

Embedded in anti-stigma ideas in mental health was an idea that work was the priority part of the new "recovery model" alongside "social inclusion" . It was a hook that sounds good until you leave the part out of Patient Choice and its crucial role in empowering recovery .

What patients really wanted we at UserWatch argue, was subsumed in a drive to herd them into meetings in Trusts and with NIMHE, to get them moving in the right direction across a few years .. Brand them with new optimistic ideas about User-Movements and Experts by Experience .. Very few obtained any real Patient Choice though ... Many had no therapy and real recovery treatment they could genuinely shape outside of monopolistic NHS Trusts busily saving money and creating the impetus for making future "surpluses"

We know of MH Users burned out by it all across the country . Some were tempted into the new organisations like NIMHE and its Users In Partnership or the Patient and Public Involvement Forums .. Most were burned out or disillusioned by it all... UIP's still exist, but are basically directionless groups.

In an economy on the up, this work driven anti stigma recovery model across 2004 - 9 seemed almost hypnotically possible and Tony Blairs influential policy statements of making the workless class (40% of which were mental health recipients of Incapacity Benefits ) work again in a something for something society took shape in David Freuds privatised mechanisms to get people off IB and into work while private firms made profits from it .. All has gone awry now .. The big credit rivers have dried up .... All SHIFT can do is shift dust gathering around it perhaps ?

Will SHIFT survive the recession ? Probably in some form or another ... Because the MH Charities and the UK Govt all think dominion ideas like their work driven ideas and the new Employment Support Allowances (in place of Incapacity Benefit) and "work is recovery" really are the answers .

We think a real Patient Choice culture with training allowances (to train where people can choose) and recovery budgets Patients can control are a better answer. We also think the Govt and society has to tolerate people of different mindedness who may never be able to be fully functional but who may be able to contribute here and there ... The mental health charities too should try tolerating that instead of being modernised workhouse masters .. Their career self interest though and Govt funding connections through the back doors l;ike the lottery will be uppermost to them ..

We doubt any serious reform will happen. Images will be spun, Trusts will make surpluses from patient care , and lives and opportunities will be lost all over again ... Why ? Self interest at the charity level and bureacratic level , and spending priorities from Govt will never enfranchise MH Users fully .. In the UK its just a fact of life .

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MIND AND RETHINK - THE TWO FACED CHARITY TOTEM AND I.B. DANCES

UserWatch in the UK has been Top-mental-health-Charity-watching for some time and its clear they face in two directions at once. There's no doubt they were responsible via consultations and even Select Committee level for what is now an altered Incapacity Benefit (IB) into the Employment Support (ESA) Allowance.

IB as of today is extinct .

The two-faced charity position is constructed by having a "we are for you" face for the domestic audience of their constituences as well as one for strategic survival with Govt at a top level .

Its been organisationally profitable for Rethink and MIND to be close to the Welfare Reform action and shaping that. More recently they obtained £18 million of Big Lottery money for anti stigma "work orientated" campaigns along with Mental Health Media a charity that supplied some data to "SHIFT" another DOH anti-stigma quangling, dangling from NIMHE. Mental Health Media is now to be absorbed into National MIND ... Confirming to some of us that its duplication of Govt policy through the back door can now quietly disappear .

Instead of creating an impetus for more Patient Choice the Top-MH Charities have gone along with the cheaper ideas of Dept Of Health's over-regulated C.B.T therapy, and no wider therapy choices . Patients cannot drive the shape of their own recovery treatments despite the visions put forwards for years . Many are still not centre to their own recovering lives through supply-choices . The system still is . The MH Large Charities have in fact re-inforced the idea of Top-Down bureacratic policy roll outs because all of them re-inforced the idea of NIMHE and CSIP (Care Services Improvment Partnerships) the mental health new bureacracies that have cost well over £100 millions from 2004 onwards

The doublespeke continues though . UserWatch picked this up in the Independent from Sophie Corlett - It appears to UserWatch to be a MIND PR attempt to show how "concerned" national MIND is now that the ESA is here

Hundreds of thousands of people who have not worked for years because of long-standing problems will be forced to hunt for jobs as the new medical assessment is gradually rolled out to the 2.5 million currently on incapacity benefit, around 40 per cent of whom have mental health problems.

The Government wants to cut the number of disability claimants by one million by 2015, even if that means unemployment figures rise.

Sophie Corlett, the director of policy at the mental health charity Mind, said: "The new benefit is system driven, hugely bureaucratic and is too inflexible to deal with the range and complexities of fluctuating mental health problems. The tragic thing is that we know what works but they haven't had the courage of their convictions."

The first line out of a BBC Social Affairs Co-respondent James Westhead's mouth tonight was to re-stigmatise benefit claimants. The BBC correspondent said the Welfare Reforms had been passed over concerns over benefit "fiddling" .

See BBC's So Called Balanced Reporting HERE

Benefit Fraud is very small in the UK and represents only 6 tenths of 1 per cent of each "Welfare Pound" spent..

From David Freud's innacurate benefit fraud-claiming interview in the Telegraph this year and from 2005 David Blunkett's claims reported in the Guardian :

The report came as the work and pensions secretary, David Blunkett, admitted the disability benefits system was "crackers", and told claimants to stop watching daytime television and get out to work. He also conceded the £13bn housing benefit bill was a "nightmare"

What we have in the UK is an attack on people at the bottom of society fanned by the media and worked with by those who believe in Top Down Goverment ..

UserWatch has to give credit to one Journalist at the Guardian - Jonathon Rutherford and this is a post of responses below he made to concerns expressed in his article about new welfare reforms (relevant to mental health ) :

Good points ET. I agree we need to change the welfare system and I agree with you that training and skills are central - so too though is proper provision for people who are mentally ill - not just CBT and a brief Condition Management Programme.

This is long term, there are no quick fixes. There are a lot of people who need long term support and it need not be in paid employment - it's about helping people find their own capacities going at their own pace knowing that benefits are not going to be taken away from them - maybe its helping people into social situations after years of isolation.

There is a tendency in this debate to talk about the unemployed without recognising that people on IB are also ill or have a disability. Also we need to recognise that years of poverty, deprivation both material and emotional, plus the dysfunctional family relationships they lead to leave their mark through generations. The damage done by the Conservative government in the 1980s lives on.