I am in a wheelchair and will never walk again. You’d think that as disabilities go, this is pretty straightforward. Yet it took me around six months to be approved for my PIP (personal independence payment).
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, I can’t help thinking that had I claimed the mental equivalent of a “bad back” – anxiety perhaps – I would have been awarded it a lot earlier.
Anxiety is now rewarded with a record number of PIP hand-outs, with more than half a million people claiming it. I’ve personally known people “too unwell to work” due to anxiety for decades, who are never too unwell to go on copious foreign holidays each year.
But do I envy these grifters? Never; I’ve always been a grafter. I’ve managed to stay reasonably emotionally stable after the ghastly events of the past year, I believe, because I never stopped working. A week after coming around from the operation that would save my life but rob me of the ability to walk, I was sitting up in bed writing about it for various publications, including this one.
“But you do something you love – it’s different for you,” I am told. Except that when I was 15 years old, I felt so inappropriately idle as a schoolgirl that I ran away from home and worked 12-hour shifts in a station chemist selling perfume until I was captured and taken home again. I was that keen to earn my own living.
Before I became disabled, not only was I up at 6am every day writing (and still am, thus still usefully paying income tax, as I have since I was 17 and still do as a pensioner of 66) but I would go out at 9am and work the morning in a menial role in a charity shop, six days a week. I can’t think of anything worse for anyone’s mental health than not having a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
It’s a received wisdom that one of the top regrets of the dying is “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”. But I’m with F Scott Fitzgerald here, when he said of his wife Zelda: “She realised too late that work was the only dignity and tried to atone for it by working herself but it was too late.”
Of course, you can work and still receive PIP – as I do – but I do think too many people are getting it when they could be supporting themselves.
So what’s in it for the state? How come it seems so happy to let the roll-call of dependency grow ever longer? Well, people who depend on the state for their living will be compliant; they will vote for the party that promises to keep the wagon trundling on that bit further.
People in work have a habit of organising against their masters; ironically, the Labour Party, now the chief sponsor of idleness, came out of the trades unions, the clue being in the name. People who work together will fulminate and rebel; those who suck in isolation at the state’s teat never will. But we know the difference. “Gizza job!” requested The Boys From The Blackstuff’s Yosser Hughes repeatedly, and our hearts went out to the simplicity and purity of his desire. He didn’t say “Give us PIP” – and if he had, we wouldn’t have liked him. We would have thought he was a layabout.
Being anxious, feeling low and even being depressed is a part of life; if we don’t learn to master these emotions, can we really call ourselves fully human? During my year in a wheelchair, I’ve had to deal with all of these, alongside other emotions as varied as fear and fury; if I and other severely physically disabled people can learn to process these feelings, why can’t those with anxiety do the same?
It’s funny; all the endless chat about feelings and the new openness about mental health doesn’t appear to have made people one whit happier – a problem shared is a problem perpetuated. But I doubt if we’ll turn back now; addiction to the highs and lows of emotion is far harder to shake than addiction to substances. Still, I do believe that stopping state hand-outs for those undergoing perfectly normal emotions might be a start.
