Suspected Alcoholics to be targeted?

I came across this bird brain idea the government has come up with to ‘help’ alcoholics. The idea is that if you are an alcoholic you must get help or have your benefits cut.

 

So what is the problem? First of all, how do you show the person is an Alcoholic? Are they going to randomly spy on people to see how much they buy or are they going to have doctors/nurses and other health workers spy on patients for them? Will they go through the patients electronic record held on a national database to see how many units of alcohol people admit to drinking or to see if they have problems that could be associated to alcohol? Will they check phone records to see who has been calling Alcoholics anonymous?

 

This is yet another example of where the government says it wants to help people, yet at the same time simply ignores the underlying problems people have and the fact that people that have problems can not easily gain access to a truly confidential service. If you tell your GP then you in affect allow every doctor/nurse you see know, admin staff get to find out, it gets put on a national database, insurance companies will find out (… the ombudsman sided with the company, when an applicant rightly declared she did not drink alcohol on an application form, but neglected to state that she was receiving psychiatric help for a drink problem, nor that she had formerly attended Alcoholics Anonymous). if you want to work with children you might have to declare it and then there are things like the child Index which could see the information shared with Social Services and Schools if someone thinks there is a ‘concern’.

 

To make things worse, there is the issue of what if they are wrong? We all know doctors see themselves as Gods who are always right and even if you do get to prove they are wrong, the original claim that you are an alcoholic is kept on file and is a stigma that will follow you around for the rest of your life. What if it gets lost? If the goverment realy cared about helping people with problems, they would spend money on allowing them access to a truly confidential and barriers, such as insurance companies being able to find out, would be removed. Instead they have decided to take another step into making the UK a surveillance society.

 

 

Links bellow

BBC news story