Mental health care and the benefits system: linked data provides opportunities for new research

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Becky Appleton explores the potential of new data linkage opportunities for understanding the intersection between mental health service use and receipt of benefits in a South London service user population.

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Social security? Evidence about benefits and mental health

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Andy Bell summarises a collection of recent academic research papers that have sought to understand the impact of a range of changes to the UK benefits system on people’s mental health.

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Childhood traumatic brain injuries predict risk of poor long-term outcomes

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Eleanor Kennedy reports on a nationwide Swedish cohort study, which finds that traumatic brain injury consistently predicted later risk of premature mortality, psychiatric inpatient admission, psychiatric outpatient visits, disability pension, welfare recipiency and low educational attainment.

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Work Capability Assessments linked with increase in suicides

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Ian Cummins considers the findings of a recent longitudinal study that measures the impact that welfare reform and disability assessments have had on mental illness and rates of suicide.

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‘Beat the cheat’: disability welfare benefits and newspaper reporting

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Gerry Bennison offers food for thought in his blog on research into how disability welfare has been characterised in popular UK tabloid articles.

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Shirkers and scroungers: Is there a link between mental health discrimination and welfare reform?

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In her first Social Care Elf blog, Sarah Carr looks at an evaluation of the Time to Change anti-stigma campaign and discovers some new findings on discrimination against those living with mental health problems.

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UK survey finds that social firms may help with vocational recovery for people with mental illness

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In the UK it is a shocking statistic that around 80-90% of people with severe mental illness are not in work.  Unemployment impacts negatively not only on the individual, but is also costly to the government. Employment is now embedded in key mental health policy as a central part of recovery. However, despite this, and [read the full story…]

Depressed people on disability benefits do as well on CBT as people not receiving benefits, according to new systematic review

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I’ve read with interest a number of recent publications that suggest that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) may be less effective in patients receiving disability benefits versus other patients. The theory here is that the specific circumstances of being on disability benefits may somehow lead to poorer outcomes following CBT. There’s some evidence in other clinical [read the full story…]