‘Benefits Distress': Violent Proletarianisation and the Production of Mental Health Harms in the English Welfare System

This paper will draw on longitudinal qualitative study exploring the lived experiences of mental health service users in England who are also claiming disability benefits. The institutional violence arising from the UK government’s programme of welfare reform and social security retrenchment has been well documented. This paper adds to that literature by outlining the socio-genesis of stressful and traumatic experiences as a result of engagement with benefit assessment and administration processes. The analysis draws on a ‘zemiological’ or ‘social harm’ approach (Canning and Tombs, 2022) to shed new light on the sociological and socio-political dynamics undermining claimants’ subjective wellbeing and generating and/or exacerbating experiences of mental distress.

The specific contribution of the paper is to identify and elaborate the particular forms and dynamics of ‘mental health harm’ (Pemberton, 2016) that are being generated in the welfare system by what Grover (2019) describes as processes of ‘violent proletarianisation’. These processes seek to drive claimants into the labour market through violent bureaucratic measures linked to wider neoliberal logics of austerity and public service commodification. These include cuts to benefit entitlements, an escalation of coercive measures to engender labour market ‘activation’, and punitive forms of welfare conditionality. These are buttressed through the weaponisation by the state (and other corporate actors) of stigma, shame and social blame in relation to ‘welfare dependency’. These strategies are, moreover, integral to the crafting by the neoliberal state of ‘technologies of consent’ for this punitive agenda. In summary, the key contribution of the paper is to highlight the mechanisms of mental health harm production, what we call ‘benefits distress’, and identify how these are underpinned by preventable social and structural harms arising from the political, economic and policy decisions of the state and its corporate partners in the welfare sector.