Former CAP client, Susan*, who is now debt free, shares her recommendations to the Government and creditors around how they can support people like her who face money and mental health challenges.
Speaking to anybody who’s working in a high position in the Government, an electric company, a water company, or similar, I would personally say: you need to learn and develop more of an understanding of mental health challenges.
My advice to energy and water companies
You need to have a mental health link on your website where someone can click it, and then they get a call back. For people like me struggling with their mental health, the phone and letters are fearful. It would be so helpful if there was something we could click to say we suffer with mental health problems, and we could be put in mental health priority groups for someone to contact us.
People with mental health are not doing this on purpose. We are not ignoring your letters on purpose, but you are not making life easy for us.
One company did do this for me. They actually put my letters in a different colour envelope so I knew what company it was coming from, which was a Godsend. Even though I might not have opened those letters, I knew which company it was coming from. So, if every company had a different colour envelope for people with mental health, when that envelope turns up, you know what you’re going to be dealing with.
My advice to the Government
To the government, you need to think of a better way of helping people with mental health, especially with benefits.
The benefits are all set up for physical health. Trying to get benefits for mental health is really difficult, and that makes it even harder for us to get jobs, to get well, and to get back in the community. And, it makes it worse for us, because we can end up in debt.
You need a proper Mental Health Task Force to really look at what’s going on with debt and mental health. It’s not one or the other; they link together. Yes, there are some people out there with mental health with no debt problems, and there are some people with really bad debt problems with no mental health, but I do think people with mental health and debt problems slip through the net.
When you try to do a PIP form or Universal Credit form with mental health, it makes it really hard to fill those forms in or to even understand them on some days when your mental health is particularly bad. You need to think about us.
Most of us would love to get back to work full-time. Most of us would love to have that support, but with the debt and the mental health, the anxiety, panic attacks, we can’t without the right support. You need to look into this.
You also need a source of people who’s got that lived experience to say, ‘Look, this is what could help’. And I believe if you did that, you would help millions of people in this country, and a lot of people would get back to work with the right support.
There are recovery colleges around the country—I actually worked for one—who do great work, but we don’t always get enough students coming because they’re not recognised as a source to help people with their mental health. You need to tap into what we’ve already got in this country and use it properly.
What I’m saying is: just take us as we are, and help us, please.
*Name has been changed on request.
