I Couldn't Care Less: Cut
Created | Updated Jun 8, 2014
Cut
You remember that letter I was on about? Well we finally got it yesterday, after the Community Psychiatric Nurse who wrote it 14 weeks after the meeting it refers to printed it off and delivered it to our flat by hand two weeks after he had printed it off and put it through the normal postal system at his office. The normal procedure, it seems, is that all post from a building 8 minutes' walk from our flat is taken to a building somewhere in a town 12 miles away, in order that it can be franked for posting. This slows down a perfectly straightforward procedure and introduces another layer of process which can lose the post or in some other way get things confused or slowed down, but I imagine it saves some money somewhere along the line. Can we stop this now, please?
The thing is that I've tried, in the past, to suggest solutions other than spending more money. I know there isn't a limitless pot of money available and blah blah recession blah austerity blah. But there does come a time when spending money, given that we live in a capitalist economy, has to be part of the solution. The franked post example is I suspect just one example of scenarios across all areas of Government expenditure where the minimal saving achieved is massively overridden by the impact. There's no way to explain this easily that I can think of, so I will simply suggest that what you're doing here is saving £100, for a system that is at least £200 worse than it was before the saving. You might be able to justify a saving that was costing in lost impact only the same as the saving itself, but when the damage is greater than the saving, is it really worth the bother?
I can't help feeling, though, that even when the damage isn't greater than the saving, it still isn't worth the bother. The Government does a lot of things that will get worse if at least the same amount of money is spent this year as was spent last year. I'm pretty damn sure that every one person with a mental illness will effect at least one other person and I'm sure you could measure the overall financial impact on the national workforce and probably calculate whether or not it was in fact the false economy. But if you're going to run a country based purely on whether or not your financial decisions have financially measurably benefits then you might as well give us all our taxes back and go home. No, Government, you are here taking money and sovereignty from your people in order that the populace might benefit from your more prudent use of their collected funds. I'll have a look at the selfish extreme of that in a minute, but first of all- if you spend less money on mental health (and loads of other things too) you are going to make them worse. You can't pretend you're cutting nonessential services or that the quality of whatever will remain the same despite the fact that you've slashed the budget by 20%, because even if you don't cut frontline staff, the workload being picked up by the staff you have cut is now going to be done by the frontline staff, who will have less time to do the actual jobs, and also have to cope with the much slower system caused by unhelpful cost cutting measures. It won't do, systems need money, it's foolish to pretend otherwise.
Just a final word, then, to the people who would rather limit spending to things they are actually going to benefit from. Everyone needs schools, and hospitals and roads, but why should I have to pay for mental health provision when I don't need it? This is a major confusion that we need to get past. The world isn't divided into the mad and the sane. The world is divided into people who have suffered mental illness and people who haven't. Yet. I'm not saying you will suffer it at any point in your life, but what I am saying is that if you do you had better hope that a well-staffed and well-funded mental health provision is in place to help you, because without it your life might just fall apart.
