Taxpayers are shelling out £800 a minute in disability benefits to people claiming anxiety-related conditions. The Mail on Sunday has the story.
The cost of Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for the disorder has rocketed from under £100 million in 2019 to nearly £427 million last year – under rules that allow anyone, regardless of their income, to collect the payments without ever seeing a doctor.
Instead, the benefit – worth up to £194 a week – can be awarded on nothing more than a personal diary or a letter from a friend describing how anxiety affects daily life.
The payments are not means-tested and there is no requirement to stop working to receive them. A full-time company director on a six-figure salary qualifies on exactly the same basis as anyone else.
Critics say the figures are the latest proof that Britain’s benefits bill is out of control, with total PIP spending projected to rise from £26 billion a year to £38 billion within five years. …
PIP is assessed on points across 12 daily living and mobility activities …
Under current rules, a person who needs occasional prompting to socialise, takes a little longer to cook, needs reminding to wash and finds travelling stressful accumulates enough points to qualify for a payout – without a diagnosis or a doctor’s note.
Since the Covid pandemic there has been a boom in payments for psychiatric disorders, which now account for more than 40% of PIP claims.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said mental health conditions accounted for 55% of the rise in disability benefits. A thriving cottage industry of unregulated no-win, no-fee firms has grown up to coach applicants through the process, taking up to 60% of any backdated payment secured.
Unlike PPI firms – limited by law to 20% of any payout – benefit claims companies face no fee limit and answer to no regulator.
On TikTok, accounts boasting hundreds of thousands of followers coach people on exactly which words to use and how to describe symptoms for maximum effect. …
In the year to this January, 66,818 people in England and Wales listed anxiety as their primary disability condition and collected an average of £122.77 a week – running up a taxpayer bill of £426.5 million, or £811 every minute.
The total claiming PIP for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has surged from 24,697 to 91,181 in six years, while those receiving it for autism has risen from 61,641 to 210,605, at a combined £2.4 billion annual cost.
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Where was all “anxiety” in 1930, 1940, 1950 1960 etc?—–There was no time for such self indulgence, as no one was going to feed your ass and pay your bills for you.——My Grandfather worked 50 years down the Michael Pit in Fife and had a huge garden full of vegetables and raised 5 kids. Today we have turned into a Nation of Government Dependent WIMPS
Benzodiazepines are a highly effective medication for this kind of symptoms and there was a time when the “War on drugs!” maniacs hadn’t yet outlawed them. Or any of the other sedating drugs humans used for … well … sedation for centuries.
Alcohol also helps, although less well and the side effects are nastier. Needless to say, the “War on mankind!” (really a better term) maniacs want to outlaw that as well.
Does this answer your question?
No——It is not the point I was making. My point is that people like my grandfather and previous generations got on with life and had no time to be “depressed”. They relied on THEMSELVES. Not Government and not drugs or alcohol. If a minority did then they would not be pandered to as happens today.
A very big problem, that could be stopped immediately. How much would this save this goofy country? A lot. Simply stop paying anyone to sit at home and get paid for being anxious. It is like paying someone to sit at home for felling alone, unhappy, happy. I never met a person who died from anxiety, why again is goofy GB paying £800 a minute for someone with anxiety. ADHD, why would anyone be paid to sit at homes with adhd. One of the worst things you can do for anyone with anxiety or adhd is to pay for them to stay at home.
That’s again one thing which doesn’t necessarily imply its opposite. Not paying someone who’s sitting at home doesn’t magically cause someone else to be willing to employ him for any kind of paid work. Which leaves the usual alternate options of begging and petty crime.
Just being mean to someone won’t guarantee any kind of positive outcome except the private happiness of the person who gets to be mean.
I wonder how many of the recipients are not Brits, living outside the UK or both.
Many are Brits, in my limited experience, such as the tall, strong, healthy 30-something son of a devout, hardworking Christian preacher, who has learned from his mother that pretending to be constantly ill lets you off ever having to work for a living. He is far from being alone in his view, and Third World Ethnics have also embraced “disabilities” with similar alacrity.
That’s what the “disabilities” system was designed for: to tempt people into faking illness to get money and avoid work. This insidiously undermines and destroys their sense of morality, especially in Christians, whose faith is supposed to be based on integrity and Christian morality. Some churches are more like hospital wards, with the total focus of prayers and conversations being on ill health.
What I have never understood about people getting now nearly £200 a week EXTRA for claiming mental health “disabilities” like “anxiety” and “depression” is…
WHY DO THEY NEED EXTRA MONEY FOR IT?
They get that extra money on top of unemployment benefit and umpteen other benefits, but WHAT ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO NEED IT FOR? What are they supposed to spend it on?
Video games? Alcohol? Recreational Drugs? Prostitutes? Machetes? Boxes of Chocolates? Holidays abroad?
Holidays, toy boys, the potential list is endless.
For those with serious, life restricting conditions we ought to show sympathy. For those who need (not would like) financial support ok. But if the conditions is drug induced we should not pay.
£200 quid a week is MORE THAN THE STATE PENSION !
I presume that all of the claimants benefitting from this largesse are living in this country? How many claimed while here but now live full or part time in countries of origin? Finally, forty or fifty years ago, someone with an autism diagnosis was fully locked in to their body and could not interact with anyone other than their closest family, if that even. Today, we hear about the spectrum where someone who looks, behaves and functions like anyone else is described as being on the spectrum and qualifies for special assistance in school and a benefits package, even if it is quite limited. How is that?
Giving benefits is never career damaging but refusing might be.
Under current rules, a person who needs occasional prompting to socialise, takes a little longer to cook, needs reminding to wash and finds travelling stressful accumulates enough points to qualify for a payout – without a diagnosis or a doctor’s note.
This is an extremely unfair interpretation of the actual rules. Trying to render this back to where it came from to would yield:
A person who cannot engage with other people face-to-face without support, who needs more than twice as long as one normally would to cook a simple meal, is regularly too stressed out to remember to wash and cannot travel anywhere without help would qualify.
sounds like most teenagers to me
😂
Sounds like a lot of unfocused adults to me. Possibly most of the tax payer funded sector.
I appreciate the joke. But teenagers are forced into a pretty structured life without them being responsible for anything because they’re not yet supposed to be able to handle this stuff.
The conditions the authors of the original text thought of are also rather more severe than you can probably imagine, especially physically. If you have to deal with anxiety, your body becomes an enemy which will fight you tooth and nail whenever you need to do something some subconcsious powers-who-are have classified as “really to dangrous to undertake” and this includes inflicting quite considerable pain as every muscle in the body can be made to cramp up by sending suitable ‘wrong’ motion commands to it.
For instance, I cannot use my bathtub or rather stopped trying to use it when every attempt to get in or out of it would end with a panic attack which caused my legs to tremble uncontrollably because this makes it physically impossible to get in or out of it. No idea why that occurred, it just did.
NB: I don’t get any benefits from the state and I’m not planning to ever claim any.
Maybe you have a soul memory of something that happened to you in a bathtub in a previous life. I don’t believe psychologists who say that people should force themselves to do things of which they are terrified, because sometimes they do have soul memories of bad things that happened in previous lives, so from the soul’s point of view, it makes perfect sense to fear those things. You could pray for guidance and reassurance about it, like the Christians do, and sometimes if you ask for help in that way, help comes in some form or other.
The point of this article is not to deny that there are genuine cases of anxiety, depression and a plethora of other mental problems, but to decry the massive deception and cost to the taxpayers of all the fraudulent cases. Handing them cash does not cure them, and makes no sense except as a deliberate Globalist attempt to weaken and corrupt them, and make them dependent upon the state.
This is not a question of feeling terrified. It’s case of one’s body being put into high alert state because of a presumed danger, a so-called fight or flight reaction supposed to enable one to do either of both quickly. This includes releasing adrenaline into the bloodstream which – among other things – cause muscles to tremble to warm them up for quick action. This gets problematic in situations were neither fight nor flight is an option because there’s simply nothing to run away from or to fight. In my case, the adrenaline release can not only become so extreme that I’m visibly trembling all over my body – that’s already bad enough, because people are going to notice that and make up an explanation for it and usually not a complimentary one – but also so much that I completely loose control of the affected extremities.
In the given case, I found myself sitting on the rim of the bathtub with both of my legs shaking so heavily that I couldn’t possibly put any weight onto them. Considering what I could do with the parts of my body still under my control in order to get out of this… Read more »
So give them a lesson in basic hygiene and cooking skills – by which time they’ll have “engaged with other people face to face” ….. and then remove the cash incentive which allows them to swing the lead.
Ah yes, the classic “It’s not my problem! Therefore, it cannot be anybody else’s problem, either!” Obviously, the universe must be exactly identical to your particular fishbowl and a world outside of it cannot possibly exist.
Absolutely ridiculous. GB going down the tube rapidly.
I assume anxiety about being relentlessly looted by the state doesn’t qualify you for anything.
Depends on the effects it has on your daily life.
That’s easy. Were skint.
🙂
Which can all be made up.
Humans can make up anything and any kind of medical diagnosis relies heavily on the patient giving an accurate description of his symptoms. But that something could have been made up is no proof that it was made up.
I was just thinking it was worth a try…..