Therapists Against the Work Cure
Statement from Partners for Counselling & Psychotherapy (PCP), 13th October 2022.On Monday 10th October 2022, World Mental Health Day, the Government announced £122 million of funding for mental health. But the bitter reality is that this money is not being spent on in-patient beds, community mental health initiatives or trained counsellors and psychotherapists for public mental health services. Instead the Government is using this money to recruit and train 700 ‘employment advisers’ to work alongside therapists in the NHS’s flagship Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. This will help drive the highly contested policy of ‘welfare conditionality’ that threatens benefits claimants with sanctions if they don’t conform to certain patterns of behaviour, a policy which targets the poorest and most deserving sections of our society at a time when they need the greatest help.
Despite the timing of the press release, the money announced is not being used to build mental health support. Instead it is an expansion of an...