For my newspaper I wrote last week about the rocketing numbers (now more than nine million) of our fellow citizens who are ‘economically inactive’ (aged 16-64, unemployed but not seeking work). Within that category, a fast-growing number (nearly three million) are claiming a range of disability or sickness-related benefits, usually a PIP (personal independence payment). Of these, something between half and three quarters are founding their claims partly or wholly on mental health problems. That number has been growing fast since lockdown, particularly among the young. And it was on the mental health component of this growing burden on our economy that I focused. I explained how a PIP can more than double the standard universal credit benefit. Once granted, the beneficiary is not chased to get a job.

Most people, including most benefits claimants, do not believe that their claims are dishonest

My Times column attracted a fierce response from online readers posting comments. Most agreed, sometimes intemperately, even embarrassingly, scornful about mental illness; but a sizeable minority expressed outrage at what they took to be an attack on the vulnerable. I’m told the response on Twitter/X, too, was stormy. ‘These claimants are not skiving or faking,’ has been my critics’ gist, ‘their distress is real, deep, and disabling. You (Parris) are cruel [/cheap/nasty/ignorant].’

Of course this is all water off a duck’s or columnist’s back, but still I find readers’ responses interesting. So many in this case take themselves to be in an almost Manichaean combat with one or the other ‘side’. Yet the deeper one digs, the more one realises how much common ground there is between the two. To locate this ground, though, you have to start from an important assumption that those of the ‘we’re-becoming-a-nation-of-spongers’ tendency will resist. The assumption is this: most people, including most benefits claimants, do not believe that their claims are dishonest.

A minority, without doubt, are having a laugh: they are knowingly trying to trick the system. But I believe a greater number have simply absorbed today’s suppositions about mental health. When it’s put to them that they may be ‘neurodiverse’ and that their life’s problems may stem from their neurodiversity, the suggestion appeals: it seems to explain so much. And when they learn there’s money in it, their interest in exploring their mental health problems grows: a process that is unconscious, the money being seen not as gain, but as compensation for loss.

One reader sent me a link to a YouTube platform hosted by a young woman called Deeanna Louise: www.spectator.co.uk/pip. I do recommend you have a look at this 12-minute video, offering advice on how to answer assessors’ questions when applying for a mental-health component of a PIP. And let me make this clear: Deeanna (who struck me as a likeable, kind and well-meaning person) never encourages claimants to tell lies. Her mission is to explain which elements and which consequences of mental illness might count towards the ‘points’ that are awarded for individual components of a claimant’s disabilities – points which are added up to a total that determines the size of the benefit.

Don’t, for instance, just claim that you feel sad: claim that your sadness adversely affects activities that are part of normal life. She offers answers to the standard questions assessors ask: answers that (she says) ‘you can do to help yourself get a good PIP claim’.

Question: ‘Can you make a meal unaided?’ This, she says, is not just a matter of mobility or dexterity, but has a mental health element: ‘[You may be] put off eating because you don’t actually have the… mental capacity to make those decisions about food.’

‘Do you not eat food at good times? Like for breakfast you eat pasta for example because you don’t have a concept about when you should eat different types of food.’

‘In a mental health sense, do you remember to have a shower? Do you need prompting to get into the shower to have a shower?’

There follow other responses about mental health to questions that may or may not be about mental health. ‘Do you have the ability to pick a matching outfit?’ ‘Does your anxiety ever prevent you from communicating?… This could be because you’ve got selective mutism, or it could be because you’re in a social situation and you get too anxious to speak.’ ‘Does socialising ever give you anxiety? And if so, how often does it give you anxiety? Because PIP will ask you how often it gives you anxiety.’

Deeanna ends up by reminding the viewer that ‘to get PIP standard, you need eight to 11 points, and to get PIP enhanced, you need 12-plus points’. She began, though, by saying that getting PIP for mental health conditions is hard. And that’s what a number of my readers have told me. I take them at their word. The claims process has become a kind of warfare, with assessors (who are not allowed access to claimants’ health records) often trying to catch claimants out, while claimants are getting wise to the process. Note in every question above, for instance, how hard it would be to disprove what Deeanna suggests might be your answers.

I shall stick my neck out. I believe both sides are for the most part acting in good faith. If ‘gaming’ a system means trying to extract what we can, that’s something we all do. The question is why millions of modern British claimants believe they’re entitled to these benefits. And the answer is to be found in the spreading belief that, in matters of mindset, clear divergence from the average is a kind of mental illness. Then labels are invented, and we clamour to attach them to ourselves. This is cruel to the much, much smaller number whose divergence is so sharp that life is a real struggle. And the irony is that many of these will be especially ill-equipped to stay the obstacle course that Deeanna Louise, for the best of motives, charts.