Opinion piece: IAPT is value-laden, non-prefigurative, non-dialogic, antidemocratic and reflects a political agenda

Andy

Andy

Retired committee member
Originally published 2017.
The government’s Work and Health Programme, due to be rolled out this autumn, involves a plan to integrate health and employment services, aligning the outcome frameworks of health services, Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), Jobcentre Plus and the Work Programme.

But the government’s aim to prompt public services and commissioned providers to “speak with one voice” is founded on traditional Conservative prejudices about people who need support. This proposed multi-agency approach is reductive, rather than being about formulating expansive, coherent, comprehensive and importantly, responsive mental health provision.

What’s on offer is psychopolitics, not therapy. It’s about (re)defining the experience and reality of a marginalised social group to justify dismantling public services (especially welfare). In linking receipt of welfare with health services and state therapy, with the single politically intended outcome of employment, the government is purposefully conflating citizens’ widely varied needs with economic outcomes and diktats, which will isolate people from traditionally non-partisan networks of unconditional support, such as the health service, social services, community services and mental health services.
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https://politicsandinsights.org/201...refigurative-non-dialogic-and-antidemocratic/
 
alktipping said:
the real question is how many people can see through their lies and what can be done about it .
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I'm afraid it's going to take a while. Big mistakes take a lot of time to unfold and this is a major one. As long as austerity is an accepted norm not much will change. Those always have a backlash, but it's slow.

I think the way forward is to bring more people to speak of their experience. It creates a public record of reality that can be unwound and it just accumulates. Pretty soon it will be possible to scour those and find knowledge within information within data. The common experience aligns with the worst case scenario depicted of this disease, unlike some of the comments we sam from Tom's post about NICE comments to the 2007 committee that have a completely fantastic perception of reality.

We may be invisible but we can be loud. The more people speak out the faster we will get out of this. I have no idea how to accomplish this. With IAPT, this is about much more than ME. It's the whole MUS project that is, quite frankly, absolutely insane. It will implode spectacularly but there is a lot of momentum behind that will keep it crashing longer than is reasonable.

There are a lot of conditions brought into this. There is a common cause for all the people affected, basically anyone with an undiagnosed health problem. I don't know how frequent that is but I'd be surprised if it's less than 5% of the population. That's a crapload of people, especially if people understood how badly screwed they would be if they developed one of those conditions and how likely it is.
 
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