From Feckless Oiks To Malingering Liars.

As the focus shifts from feckless oiks to malingering liars take a look at Bendy Girl’s blog

Note the title.

There are a lot of excellent links to other disability pages on Bendy Girl’s page, in particular But You Don’t Look Sick offers one persons first hand account of being disabled.

In some developing countries people who are fit to work but who can earn more from begging will mutilate themselves or their children, knowing that the more obvious their disability the more money they will receive from charitable strangers. Of course, the terribly ill are unable to beg and disappear which is why religious institutions and later the State decided that a more collective approach to care would be less grotesque. And still we expect the ill to perform to prove how ill they are, sometimes to us and more often to someone from ATOS Healthcare the company which interviews people who need disability benefit. They’re notorious for their abuse of power.

There’s a great deal of information in these few webpages and they give some indication of the complexity of the system that a person who is physically ill or disabled must contend with. The person with a mental illness, who can indeed take a pen from a pocket, turn on a tap and sit for 30 minutes but will be entirely unable to work within the employment culture we have now has particular problems with a system that doesn’t welcome people in wheelchairs, let alone a hidden illness.

MIND offers analysis.

along with the LSE