September 2025 – Recovery in the Bin

The RITAs Awards #RITASawards

The full list of The RITAs Awards for Excellence in Awfulness 2025!

Patronising Interventions Award sponsored by having a cup of tea in a warm bath CIC (we’re Disability Confident™): The Decider life skills program for those for whom DBT has been deemed too expensive.

Bad Samaritan Award: The Samaritans (for rationing calltime)

Charity of the Year award for services to sponsored marathons: MIND

Professional Tosser Award (Joint): Jonathon Shedler and Mark Ruffalo (not the actor) For their verbal diarrhoea on X/Twitter

Marie Antoinette Award for Obliviousness: Prof Appleby fails to respond to survivors and ignores deaths caused by government policies including DWP and removal of Trans healthcare.

Worst description of survivors by professionals Award: “Sick role”

We are so rebellious that conservatives agree with us and we have book deals, and appear on TV: The Criticals – The nickname for professionals viewed as radical/critical thinking about MH services and disciplines yet aren’t revolutionary but are just seeking to replace one hierarchy with theirs.

Lifetime Achievement for Total Bollocks Award: Peter Tyrer – For his endless judgemental and stigmatising promotion of “Personality Disorder”. Runner up: Rachel Perkins

The Award Award, an award for the best award that health professionals award to each other at self congratulatory conferences. Sponsored by Ostrich Narcissus Private Equity Fund: BIGSPD – the annual party for personality disorder professionals to congratulate themselves.

Most extractive and exploitative false co-production award, sponsored by NHS England: Tim Kendall, for SIM

Worst Trust of the Year Winner: Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT)

Nominated:

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT)

Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT)

Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (GMMH)

Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust (KMPT)

Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust (LSCFT)

Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT)

Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (SABP)

Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV)

Worst Ward Award: Roseacre (Cygnet Maidstone)

Runner up: Moredun ward, NHS Tayside.

Worst Community Health Award: Pendle CMHT

Worst Intervention Award: Oxevision

Runners up: CBT / IAPT & IPS (Individual Placement & Support)

Worst MH Trust CEO: Brent Kilmurray for TEWV.

Runner up: Claire Murdoch.

The Chocolate fireguard achievement in creative report writing award: Care Quality Commission CQC

Worst thing said to you by a health professional, Award sponsored by ‘its your choice, you have capacity to kill yourself’ (Joint):

“You do know that you have a Black gene that is causing you to be mentally ill”

“Your brain lacks the foundations of an ordinary building which is why you should take Sodium Valproate”

“Katy has a different kind of brain ”

“The thing about Sophie is, there’s nothing you can do to help her.”

“well you’re quite the prolific self harmer anyway. we’ve already decided you don’t need a bed, we just need to tick you off” (said to me as soon as they met me, before they even said hello).

“I ain’t going to coroner’s court for you & neither will your private therapist, the trust, or the ambulance service. You have capacity”. Then she (NHS rapid response service) hung up the phone on me. This was seconds after a suicide attempt when I was home alone.

“You can’t have autism, you don’t like trains”, said by an NHS psychiatrist medical director who had “worked with autistic people for many years”. (later diagnosed with autism).

“Nurse telling me to try losing weight with keto to cure anorexia has to be up there right? Apparently I’d lose ten kilos a month if I just ate as much meat as possible and nothing else. Impressive double whammy of ‘not how to help an anorexic’ and ‘not physiologically possible’.”

Refused help because you won’t meet services “recovery targets”

Award Goes to ‘The unknown professional’ for all these things that are said. You know who you are!

Worst Broadcaster: Channel 4, Fraser Nelson (Dispatches: Inside Britain’s £48 Billion Benefits Scandal). This was journalistic malpractice by Dispatches, Fraser Nelson has a well documented bias against social security and advocates for far right positions (noticeably he edited The Spectator, a magazine that has posted defences of Nazis -who under Aktion T4 exterminated 250,000 disabled people as a precursor to the Holocaust), this cherry picked meritless hit piece is beneath acceptable standards. The real story is the thousands of deaths caused by the DWP. deathsbywelfare.org

Most repulsive think tank: Centre for Social Justice

Political gaslighter of the Year Award: The government front bench & the Westminster media lobby.

You can’t call someone a liar in parliament, but we’re not in parliament, so LIAR! Award: Keir Starmer

Cuts will set you free, Fiscal Incompetence Award: Rachel Reeves

Worst co-production Award: Timms PIP Review

Runners Up: Knowledge and Understanding Framework (KUF) training programme.

A provider who churns out “co-produced patient lounges” in inpatient wards like there’s no tomorrow… because patients would all rather choose the colour of a gaming chair than have strategic influence.

Lifetime Achievement Award for Democidal Policies: Iain Duncan Smith

DWP War Criminal of the Year: Joint award to Liz Kendall and Stephen Timms.

RITB Honours #RITBhonours

The full list of (Binners are) Winners of Recovery in the Bin Honours.

Innovative activist Honour: Dolly Sen

For her innovative art, activism, and films, including ‘sectioning’ the DWP for being a danger to claimants.

Legal win of the year Honour: Ellen Clifford DPAC

For winning a judicial review against the DWP

Loony/Allie of the Year Honour: Jay Watts

A survivor and professional who has tirelessly, consistently, supported and amplified fellow survivors’ work and needs.

Best Magazine Honour: Asylum

What more can we say! Asylum continues to be a fab radical magazine for 40 years

Best Journalist Honour: John Pring Disability News Service.

Author of ‘The Department’, disabled journalist John has been holding the DWP and others to account for 25 years as the only news agency specialising in disability issues.

Fab activism Honour: Stop Oxevision

Stop Oxevision is a brilliant, thorough, well researched campaign to highlight the use of Oxevision, a patient monitoring system consisting of an infrared sensor and camera, which can be used to observe patients remotely.

Best mad research Honour:

NSFT Crisis Learning From Deaths report July 2024

Mental health campaigners held Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust to account for thousands of patient deaths.

Runners up Menstrual health in psychiatric inpatient settings – Hat Porter et al

Wren Aves – self-harm research, Escaping iatrogenic harm: A journey into mental health service avoidance

Best Campaign Win

Everyone who fought against the Pathways to Work Green Paper and the PIP & UC Bill.

Our Highest Honour:

Lifetime Fellowship Of The Unknown Survivor – to everyone living with mental distress and illness who has lived through another year, we persist.

Love, Rita ❤️ xoxo

DWP’s Nation of Snitches

a glass faced office building of many floors, in many windows are giant eyeballs watching you, in one dark window two red eyes glare out.

One day a woman was admiring my new outfit and smiling, casually said “careful someone might phone the DWP” making a phone call gesture (because of course that someone might be her).

My blood ran cold, in that moment I really disliked that person and will think they’re scum forever. This is not the first or last time this has happened, that people jump to this response in relation to something like nice clothes is disturbing to me but apparently acceptable to others. The fact that I’m on disability benefits is clearly never far from their minds and weaponising it against me isn’t either.

Another time a friend queried whether I should be spending my benefits money (£25) on a massage, y’know shouldn’t it be for things like food and leccy? She didn’t know anything about benefits, my benefits, why I get them or anything else but thats ok she entitled to question me about it.

The idea that they are paying for you so they have the right to police you, that “taxpayers” rhetoric has really worked in a very deep rooted way. Its not my money, its theirs.

Every time this happens I find myself justifying to myself why I bought new clothes, why I bought a massage, why I needed them, because I’m doing it too.

I’ve been investigated for fraud twice, once in the 90s when legislation changed in April and suddenly lots of people where committing fraud so we had to report en masse to the fraud dept. And a second time around 2010, I say second time but it actually lasted for 6 yrs. I was summoned to the fraud dept, was questioned and had to give a statement, I was told “90% of people who come into this room end up in court”. I didn’t, I still have no idea what fraud I was accused of, why and more importantly who reported me. For 6yrs I received constant forms to fill in and random phone calls; someone would say their name really fast, so I couldn’t catch it and then bark questions at me “how much money did I have in my account? How many times I had I been abroad in the past ten years (with outgoing/incoming dates). They always refused to repeat their name or give me any details such as a phone number.

Could you do that? Tell someone how much money you have down to the last penny on demand? Do you have the dates of all your travel over the past decade memorised? Tell a stranger that phoned you without warning?. I had to. This was also information I already provided multiple times.

It was suggested, by welfare rights, that the DWP had a vendetta against me, that it was purely malicious, I had the option to take action but by that point I didn’t want to poke the wasps nest any further. I depend on the DWP for my survival. The harassment abruptly stopped when I moved onto PIP & ESA.

I should add that I’m in the Substantial Risk group as I am “a danger to myself and /or others and must be supervised at all time”. It doesn’t protect you from the abuse of the DWP.

I’ve been dismayed on social media at how many disability benefit recipients including activists suggested in response to the “my Aunty gets PIP but I know shes faking disability” posts, with “Oh you should report her then, that’s on you”. When I suggest “how about we mind our own business” people got very defensive and pissed off at me because I’ve committed the sin of having unwavering solidarity with all my fellow benefit claimants (real or fictional) and perhaps highlighted their lack of.

We are not only conditioned to accept that there is extreme wealth, with all its idleness, greed and corruption, to admire & aspire to it, but also to focus on each other instead, punch down or across, but never up. Focus on the minutiae not the big picture. Across class antagonism is an invaluable, no, essential tool of the state and it will do anything to maintain it.

We are also conditioned to accept that there is extreme poverty, but unlike wealth, it must be monitored, scrutinised and policed. Your neighbour might be spending money on something the state might not approve of. Your poor friend on benefits might be the undeserving kind of poor. Its up to you to decide that, no evidence needed, you must be the eyes and ears of the state.

And so the DWP panopticon has tentacles reaching out into the wider society, we are taught to act in the interest of the state at all times, we become its unquestioning agents. In collusion with and fawning over our benefactors who are also our oppressors. Its so engrained in us that that to question or challenge it is considered itself an act of antagonism, I’ve been accused of policing what people can say because this is also part of the conditioning; to accuse dissenters of the v thing you are being told to do.

We are expected to carry and enact the DWPs pettiness and spite. Poor people against poor people, because are all poor, the taxpayer and the scroungers together, we are all poor and making someone else poorer, won’t make you any less poor.

Its never OK to encourage people to report someone for benefit fraud, not as a joke, not a gotcha, to highlight hypocrisy, to make a point, never. For a myriad of reasons its not ok.

Just mind your own business

It can destroy someone’s life, it can cause someone’s death.