Mental health experts criticise government austerity agenda
Over 400 psychotherapists, counsellors, and other mental health professionals have described government proposals contained in the budget as “profoundly disturbing” and creating an “intimidatory disciplinary regime”.
In a letter to The Guardian newspaper, the experts said that austerity cuts are impacting on the emotional and psychological wellbeing of the nation, and amounted to nothing more than unethical ‘get to work therapy’.
Increasing inequality and poverty, families being moved out of their homes and new systems determining benefit levels were part of “a wider reality of a society thrown completely off balance by the emotional toxicity of neoliberal thinking”, according to more than 400 signatories to the letter. The consequences were “most visible in the therapist’s consulting room”.
The letter’s writers said it “sounds the starting bell for a broadly based campaign of organisations and professionals against the damage that neoliberalism is doing to the nation’s mental health”.
The 2015 budget…
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