Severe Bipolar Clinical Depression vs. WCA: In Error, Immoral, Unethical, and Impossible For Me To Attend Supporter Morgan Freeman, in a personal capacity Your Ref. (My NI No.): WM549438D Dear DWP/Atos Staffer, On Sat 01 June 2013, I was aghast to receive a letter, signed ‘Atos Healthcare’ (sic) and dated Thu 30 May 2013, summoning me to attend what I can only assume is the infamous and discredited ‘Work Capability Assessment’ (WCA) [1] at 15:20 on Fri 14 Jun 2013 at a ‘Marylebone Medical Assessment Centre’. The letter and accompanying pamphlet both neglect to mention the actual name of the assessment I am being summoned to attend. I am currently bumping along the bottom of an episode of severe bipolar clinical depression; so it’s taking an excessively strenuous and stressful amount of mental energy, dogged perseverance, and fitful concentration to overcome the depressive symptomatic urge to just “Bin this rubbish, and face the detrimental consequences later (which is all I deserve anyway, because I’m worthless scum)”, and rather to do the right thing: to explain to the DWP/Atos why I believe this summoning to be in error, immoral, unethical, and impossible for me to attend. So although I am currently at just about my weakest and most vulnerable, and therefore least able to self-advocate in my own best interests, I shall nevertheless take some days to assemble my considered response. Since this considered response message is both thorough and extensive, you may prefer to read it on paper rather than on screen. To that end, I have attached a version formatted for printing on A4 paper: • ‘Severe Bipolar Clinical Depression vs. WCA.pdf’ – PDF, 3.5 MB, pp26, this very document When this document is viewed in a PDF reader app on screen (such as Adobe Reader, OS X Preview, etc.), you should be able to access the web hyperlinks to external content – news reports, video on demand (VoD), etc. – Severe Bipolar Clinical Depression vs. WCA: In Error, Immoral, Unethical, and Impossible For Me To Attend Page 1 of 26 as indeed you can from within the HTML-formatted email message to which it was attached. Note also that while GoogleMail can be unreliable in transmitting inline images, the PDF version is guaranteed to be correctly illustrated. THE STRUGGLE TO ACQUIRE ADEQUATE EMAIL ADDRESSES @Atos – This impersonal boilerplate letter from your profit-centric enterprise (£100 million per year from the DWP! [2]) simply presumes that any recipient can use a telephone to respond to its contents, which seems to be a self-evidently preposterous presumption when it is being sent out to people living with a diverse range of physical and mental health conditions and disabilities. As my completed ESA50 form clearly indicates, there are a host of severe-clinical-depression-related symptomatic reasons why I cannot simply pick up the phone and make outgoing calls to untrusted strangers; and your letter significantly fails to provide an email address by which to communicate in writing, nor any web address where such might be found, thus forcing me to try to discover such by online searching. The closest to your Atos ‘appointments help desk’ I can find is your ‘ESA/WCA Customer Service’ email address, <[email protected]> – so do please forward this message as appropriate within the atoshealthcare.com domain in order to expedite correcting the error detailed below, and cancel the WCA at 15:20 on 14 Jun 2013 at Marylebone Medical Assessment Centre. @DWP – The impersonal boilerplate letter from Atos states, “[…] if you would like more information about why you need an assessment, please contact the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) office that deals with your claim.” My most recent ‘Employment and Support Allowance – Support Group’ (ESA-SG) entitlement letter, dated Thu 07 Feb 2013, also significantly fails to provide an email address by which to communicate in writing, and of the web address it does contain, my ISP's ‘BT Web Address Help’ service has this to say: “Sorry, the website www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk cannot be found.” By using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I was able to establish that this domain hasn’t been updated since Thu 31 Jan 2013, so its inclusion in my Thu 07 Feb 2013 ESA-SG entitlement letter seems to have been perversely unhelpful. So yet again, I’ve been forced to try to discover an appropriate email address by online searching. My best educated guesstimate is the email address behind the [ Contact JobCentre Plus central team ➔ ] button on the DirectGov domain's ‘Contact Jobcentre Plus’ web service, which for my postcode yields up: To: <[email protected]> Subject: JCP Contact Us Local Office - London (Makerfield) Benefit Centre So, as far as using snail mail letters to provide ESA claimants with an up-to-date relevant email contact address goes, both Atos and the DWP’s complete lack of any effort whatsoever are best categorised as a double-headed “EPIC FAIL!”; and again – do please forward this message as appropriate within the jobcentreplus.gsi.gov.uk domain in order to expedite correcting the error detailed below. As you can no doubt appreciate, before I can even get to begin to address the substantive issue at hand, I’ve been forced to expend both significant time and mental effort in not only seeking out how to contact Atos and the DWP by email, but also in highlighting for both organisations their joint failures in providing an up-to-date relevant email contact address in their snail mail letters to ESA claimants. Thankfully, I have over time acquired the prerequisite ICT skills and resources, and can at a push summon up sufficient personal tenacity, both of which have been necessary to locate the most likely correct email address candidates to which to send my considered response message. However, no doubt many other sick and disabled folk in a similar situation, who could also positively benefit from exchanging written communications by email, are being blocked from doing so by Atos and the DWP’s “EPIC FAIL!” in providing claimants with an up-to-date relevant email contact address. Please do consider dragging your business communications channels kicking and screaming into the 21st century, since sending snail mail letters is both unnecessarily slow, resource and energy profligate, and soooo 19th century, while some people (like me) simply cannot use 20th century phone technology due to the disability and/or illness which forms the basis of our entitlement to ESA-SG. Severe Bipolar Clinical Depression vs. WCA: In Error, Immoral, Unethical, and Impossible For Me To Attend Page 2 of 26 MEDICAL, DISABILITY, AND BENEFIT ENTITLEMENT HISTORY I am a person living with Type II Bipolar Affective Disorder, and have been doing so for three decades. Under the direction of my ex-consultant psychiatrist, we trialled each of the current crop of psychotropic prophylactic mood stabiliser medications, all of which only have a therapeutic effect for a proportion of people with bipolar disorder – and unfortunately, for each drug, I fell in the cohort of patients for whom that drug fails to stabilise pathological mood swings. So the only medication I have found to be effective is an antidepressant, a second generation serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor called venlafaxine. This has an effect in limiting the duration of my episodes of severe bipolar clinical depression, but not their severity. I’ve been taking 150 mg of venlafaxine per day since February 2013, to address this current episode of severe clinical depression, at which dosage I’m told it inhibits the synaptic reuptake of two neurotransmitters, namely serotonin and noradrenaline (aka norepinephrine in the USA). Up to 2012, I was in receipt of Income Support (IS) in lieu of Incapacity Benefit (IB), along with Disability Living Allowance (DLA) – the latter of which I continue to receive. In late 2011, I received and completed my ESA50 questionnaire form (but only with the loving assistance of my life long friend and supporter Andreas Goldner), and the stress and anxiety thus provoked in me by the DWP and Atos in necessitating my transition from IS to ESA-SG cost me very dearly indeed, by plunging me head first into a six-month long episode of severe bipolar clinical depression. In early 2013, the prospect of the forthcoming changes to benefits precipitated another descent into severe clinical depression. I was forced to spend a month and a half persuading Lambeth Council that they were breaching their own Council Tax Support (CTS) policy to fully protect vulnerable residents, including disabled people, from the detrimental effects of the changeover from Council Tax Benefit (CTB) to CTS, since they were demanding money with menaces from me – they threatened to take expensive legal action against me, which I was apparently expected to pay for, over non-payment of a personal Council Tax liability for 2013/2014, which they eventually conceded amounted to… £0.00. Now in mid 2013, I receive what I believe to be an erroneous summoning to attend an unspecified ‘fitness for work’ assessment, and going by the evidence available online from other sick and disabled people in a similar situation, I may be facing another months-long uphill battle with Atos and the DWP to get this error corrected. Needless to say, the stress and worry created by these national and local state attacks on my benefit entitlements continues to have a detrimental effect on my mental health and general well-being; and looming large on the horizon, and with much dark foreboding, comes the prospect of being forced to negotiate the transitions from DLA to Personal Independence Payment, and from multiple benefits to Universal Credit.