Austerity cuts are causing mental distress and are linked to rise in suicides, health professionals warn

​But for government cuts, Mark Wood, a mentally ill young man, might not have died. And with suicide rates continuing to rise, austerity measures are costing more minds and lives every day. Mary O'Hara wonders why the system doesn't care

Casualty: Mark Wood’s doctor had cautioned that he was unfit for any kind of work, blaming his death directly on his loss of benefits

When Mark Wood was found dead in his home in August 2013 it could have been just another tragic, but private, event for one family. But it wasn't. His death came a few months after his disability benefits had been cut because he had been declared “fit for work” by the assessors appointed by the Government to implement its “back-to-work” strategy.

When his body was discovered he weighed just 5st 8lbs. His doctor said his body mass index was “not compatible with life”. His sister, Cathie, said that 44-year-old Wood had struggled to live on just £40 a week after his disability and housing benefits were cut. She says that his ongoing mental health problems, including anxiety, obsessive traits and an eating disorder, were seriously aggravated by the extra stress. A letter to the Jobcentre written by Wood's GP at the time his benefits were being cut was presented at the inquest into his death. In it, his doctor cautioned that Wood was “absolutely unfit for any work whatsoever”. At the inquest, the GP told the coroner that, in his view, the loss of benefits was an “accelerating factor” in Wood's decline and eventual death.

The circumstances surrounding Wood's death hit the UK headlines after his family launched a campaign calling on the Government to rethink its cuts and other austerity-driven policy reforms. Yet his case is far from isolated. In August 2015, after a number of Freedom of Information requests, the Government released mortality statistics on people who had died after being declared fit for work. The data did not cover how they died, and the Government warned against any causal links being made between the deaths and the assessments, but the episode prompted calls for ministers to commission an analysis so that any potential connections could be understood.

Alarm bells: the postman can be a source of fear for people who face having their benefits reduced (Alamy)

In the UK, suicide rates rose in 2011 and 2012 (the most recent years available for data). Men especially seem to be at risk: the male suicide rate is the highest it's been since 2001 and, for men between the ages of 45 and 59, the highest since 1981. After five years of austerity – and with billions of pounds more of budget cuts on the way – families, charities, mental health professionals, campaigners and researchers have been highlighting what they regard as the profound effects on mental health.

Above a row of shops in a bustling high street in south London are the offices of CoolTan Arts, a grassroots mental health charity. Inside is a small group of men and women, sipping tea and eating biscuits around the kitchen table.Everyone here has first-hand experience of living with mental health problems and some have multiple disabilities. When we meet, the UK's general election has just taken place and everyone present is anxious about what will happen. The new Conservative majority government has pledged to shrink social security spending by an additional £12bn – on top of the billions already cut since 2010. In July 2015, the Chancellor's second Budget in four months outlined plans for a raft of new reforms, which included a freeze on working-age benefits for four years and cuts to Employment and Support Allowance for new claimants deemed capable of “work-related activity”.

If they didn’t have mental issues before, they have them now because they are being so degraded

&#13; <p>Dec, single parent, Luton</p>&#13;

The cuts to mental health budgets and changes to the benefits system, including tough “back-to-work” policies ushered in by the Coalition, are never far from the minds of those at CoolTan. Punitive financial sanctions, where proportions of benefits are withheld have been adding to ever-greater anxiety.

“My worst enemy is the postman,” Adam [some names have been changed] says, describing what it's like waiting to hear if he has been sanctioned. With fewer places to turn for help, George also says he fears for the future. The others around the table nod. They agree that, in a climate of continual cuts and political rhetoric that classifies people who don't work as outcasts, they would be “lost” without the help of CoolTan.

The experiences of the people at this one small charity are far from an anomaly. Research published in September by Mind, the UK's largest mental health charity, reported that for people with mental health problems, the Government's flagship back-to-work scheme, the Work Programme, made their distress worse in 83 per cent of cases.

My own research interviewing hundreds of people across the UK during the first wave of austerity produced consistently similar insights. Typical comments made to me in interviews between 2012 and 2015 include this from Dec, a single parent in Luton who was struggling to find work. “There's people who are suicidal,” he told me, holding back tears. “There's people with mental health problems – and if they didn't have mental issues before, they have them now because they are being so degraded.”

Mark Wood’s sister, Cathie, said he had struggled to live on just £40 a week after his disability and housing benefits were cut

Both the Coalition and the 2015 Conservative Government have defended cuts in a number of areas, including welfare, as being necessary to tackle government borrowing. They have also said that the most vulnerable are offered protection. A spokesperson for the Department of Work and Pensions says: “It's important we don't simply write off people who have a health condition to a life on benefits... We provide unconditional support to those who can't work, and jobs-support to those who can – for example, through the £40m we're investing in Jobcentres for people with mental health conditions. Our reforms are fixing the welfare system to ensure it promotes work, helps people lift themselves out of poverty and puts public spending on a more sustainable footing.”

No matter where in the world you are, look at the research, and the evidence is clear: economic strain contributes to mental health difficulties – especially during recessions, when unemployment and poverty tend to jump.

One study exploring the effects of the 2008 financial crash reached some stark conclusions. Analysing data from 24 EU countries, the US and Canada, the researchers reported that, by 2011, the economic crisis had already led to over 10,000 more suicides than would have been expected – which they called a “conservative estimate”. The downward trend in suicide rates seen in the EU before 2007 went into reverse when the financial crisis hit, rising 6.5 per cent by 2009. In the US the rate increased by 4.8 per cent over the same period.

Yet the study also showed that the trends were not uniform: many countries did not see any increase in suicide rates. The researchers suggested that a range of interventions – from back-to-work programmes to prescriptions for antidepressants – may reduce the risk of suicide during future economic downtowns.

But what of the specific effects of large-scale government cuts? In The Body Economic, Sanjay Basu and David Stuckler examined data over decades, concluding that austerity was bad for both physical and mental health. “If austerity were tested like a medication in a clinical trial, it would have been stopped long ago, given its deadly side effects… One need not be an economic ideologue – we certainly aren't – to recognise that the price of austerity can be calculated in human lives,” they wrote in The New York Times.

They went on to argue that countries that have chosen stimulus over austerity, such as Germany, Sweden and Iceland, have had better health outcomes than countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain, where austerity measures have been used. Greece – a country with traditionally lower suicide rates than other European nations – has felt the impact of austerity more than most. A landmark study led by Professor Charles Branas, of the University of Pennsylvania, incorporated a 30-year month-by-month analysis of suicides in Greece, ending in 2012. The researchers looked at possible links between suicide data and particular prosperity- and austerity-related events over the three decades, including the acceptance of Greece into the EU, the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and the passing of austerity measures by the government.

While cautious not to link the cause directly to austerity, the researchers found “a significant, abrupt and sustained increase” in suicides following austerity-related events such as announcements of spending cuts and violent protests against them; 2012 was a peak year for suicides in Greece.

Mental health services in the UK are notoriously underfunded and are often referred to as a “Cinderella service”. According to the Centre for Economic Performance, mental health services receive just 13 per cent of the total NHS budget, while mental illness is responsible for 23 per cent of the loss of years of healthy life caused by all illness nationwide. Under the Coalition, there were numerous moves to place mental health at the top of the wider health agenda. A variety of pledges and initiatives were made, many championed in particular by the then Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. Proposals that included, for the first time, specific waiting-time targets for people seeking treatment were widely seen as a step forward. So, too, was a commitment to invest more in young people's mental health provision.

But mental health provision was hit hard and early by austerity measures. Despite rising demands for help, including from people in crisis or feeling suicidal who were turning up at A&E departments ill-equipped to deal with them, mental health services and the people relying on them were feeling the impact. Organisations from Oxfam to activist groups such as Disabled People Against Cuts and War on Welfare warned of an unprecedented “perfect storm” of falling incomes, rising costs and the removal of vital safety nets, including for mental health and disability, just when the pressure on individuals and families was skyrocketing.

'Economic strain contributes to mental health difficulties – especially during recessions, when unemployment and poverty tend to jump' (Getty) (Getty Images)

The figures back this up. In 2011, three years after the financial crisis, the number of prescriptions for antidepressants rose sharply, up 43 per cent on the previous year. One investigation found that more than 2,000 acute mental health beds were lost in England between 2011 and 2013. This meant that many people in crisis, who didn't have a safe place to be, had to be transported hundreds of miles to wherever a bed became available. Some patients were even held in police cells.

By 2015, funding for mental health services was estimated to have fallen in real terms by 8.25 per cent over four years. Three-quarters of children and young people with a mental health issue could not access treatment when they needed it. Charities warned that this was also storing up problems for the future because it prevented early intervention, something proven to be crucial for young people's recovery prospects.

Meanwhile, it was reported that calls to mental health helplines from people citing financial problems shot up in line with personal indebtedness. Reports, including a number from the Centre for Welfare Reform, catalogued how policies such as the “bedroom tax” (where benefits can be reduced if someone is deemed to have a “spare” bedroom in their council or housing association home) were “savaging” people's mental health.

A man doused himself in petrol outside a Jobcentre after being declared fit for work

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On the front line of mental health, the strain of five years of austerity became such that hundreds of health professionals took to writing to newspapers about it. In one highly critical letter to The Guardian on the Government's public health record, senior physicians linked austerity policies to rising suicides, concluding that “over the last five years, there have been avoidable deaths and much unnecessary damage to health”.

Another letter, published before the 2015 election, signed by 442 professionals ranging from psychologists to epidemiologists, said: “The past five years have seen a radical shift in the kinds of issues generating distress in our clients: increasing inequality and outright poverty, families forced to move against their wishes, and, perhaps most important, benefits claimants (including disabled and ill people) and those seeking work being subjected to a quite new, intimidatory kind of disciplinary regime.”

Psychologists Against Austerity, a new alliance of mental health professionals, had formed with the aim of directly challenging the cuts and welfare changes that they said were adding to mental distress. The group produced a briefing paper that includes five “austerity ailments” it believes contribute to worsening mental despair. These are: humiliation and shame, instability and insecurity, isolation and loneliness, being trapped or feeling powerless, and fear and distrust.

When the impacts of austerity are discussed in the UK, deaths feature prominently. Like Wood, some of the people who have died had a history of mental health problems. Others didn't. And there are many stories. Nick Dilworth is a frontline welfare advice worker with the Citizens' Advice Bureau and a longstanding critic of the government's back-to-work strategy who also monitors and analyses welfare statistics. He sums up the reality of dealing with the consequences like this: “These people have multiple problems. You get grown men crying. What you see are broken lives.”

An anti-austerity march in London earlier this year (Getty) (Getty Images)

In one case, a man doused himself in petrol outside a Jobcentre after being declared fit for work and experiencing benefits delays. Police arrived in time to save him. A pensioner in his seventies was believed to have killed himself due to fears about the “bedroom tax”. Witnesses testified to the inquest that he was frightened by news reports that said people might lose their homes if they couldn't pay it.

The issue of deaths related to welfare reform and austerity, be they a result of suicide or otherwise, is complex and controversial. There have been escalating calls from families and campaigners for a full public investigation into deaths that followed cuts to benefits or the implementation of sanctions. And when, in September this year, a coroner in north London concluded that the suicide in 2013 of a 60-year-old disabled man, Michael O'Sullivan, was a direct result of having been wrongly found fit for work, there were yet more calls for the Department for Work and Pensions to overhaul fitness-for-work assessments.

More research and better data is needed, but mental health strains are clearly exacerbated by economic factors, according to Joe Ferns, director of policy and research at Samaritans. Part of the problem, he says, is that stresses such as financial pressures or losing a job make people feel “disempowered” and “less able to cope”. But people can be affected by the community around them, too. “What the research does show is that people living in deprived areas are about 10 times more likely to die by suicide … I think it's fair to say that an economic recession creates ripples,” Ferns says. “The social impacts spread far wider and last far longer than the economic ripples.”

But more research will take time and, as epidemiologist Sanjay Basu has pointed out, there is already considerable evidence of serious and deleterious effects, which require robust policy responses, not least because people's lives are on the line. Basu says: “We can either pay now in terms of creating the social safety nets in order to avoid a real dismantling of some of the key parts of our communities or we'll face the consequence for many years.”

Charities, healthcare professionals, academics and those on the front line agree: act now, or suffer more later. The Department of Health tell me that they are tackling “historic underfunding” in mental health, increasing investment in the area by £300m last year. They mention that “more people than ever before” are receiving talking therapies and that the Government's Suicide Prevention Strategy is backed by £1.5m funding for research.

But will this be enough to stop people dying because of, at least in part, the UK's austerity measures? At CoolTan Arts, one woman makes a point that's hard to ignore. “I think it's going to get much worse,” says Jane. “This government has got another full term and you don't know what their plans are.”

This is an edited version of an article first published on mosaicscience.com. It is republished here under a Creative Commons licence

Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone who is struggling to cope. You can call free on 116 123, email jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find details of the nearest branch.