Residential mobility, mental health and welfare reform

This thesis qualitatively examines the interplay between service users’ residentialmobility and mental health and assesses the ways in which each is influenced ordetermined by the other. Twenty-five service users in England were over a periodof eighteen months interviewed in depth about their experiences of both residential mobility and mental health. These interviews were conducted against the backdrop of the on-going austerity-driven reforms to the welfare state that have witnessed the rapid promulgation of policies designed to spur service user entry into the formal labour market, via the use of restrictions on continued eligibility for particular sickness, disability, and housing benefits, and reductions in their monetary value.Evidence from the interviews is used to test two of the primary models through which the residential mobility patterns of service users have beenexplained: displacement from unstable lodgings resulting in circulation throughdisparate residential settings; and entrapment in low quality accommodation inpredominately deprived areas. The thesis finds evidence of both scenarios, andreports on the negative health experiences encountered therein. It demonstratesthat the extent to which residential circumstances have a negative impact onmental health rests upon whether service users feel unable to exercise any controlover their residential choices. The exercise of which is being further compromisedby a hastily reformed system for determining on-going eligibility to welfare benefits and a wider retrenchment of the services and facilities around which users have often orientated their lives. Here, invasive and ineffectual medical assessments destabilise service users and threaten a reduction in income, enforced changes in accommodation, and the rupture of their carefully calibrated wellness strategies which, in the absence of wider service provision, are increasingly emplaced in and around users’ own homes. The findings raise considerable questions about the operation of the welfare system and its impact for service users’ health and residential stability