Heavy Metal Disability Benefits

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/gl ... y-benefits

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

How far until my addiction to eating Cheetos and playing Tetris gets recognized?

[trap15]

brb moving to sweden

[null1024]

"I signed a form saying: 'Roger feels compelled to show his heavy metal style. This puts him in a difficult situation on the labor market. Therefore he needs extra financial help'. So now I can turn up at a job interview dressed in my normal clothes and just hand the interviewers this piece of paper," Tullgren said.

Not sure whether to clap in awe or cry that he was able to get away with this.

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

Yeah, I wasn't sure if I was impressed or disappointed. Heavy Metal fans are the best.

[Ed Oscuro]

With a name like Roger, they'll never suspect until it's too late!

[Randorama]

In Sweden it is relatively easy to get extra welfare if one can prove to have some "mental problem", the labeling and evidence of which can be fairly evanescent.

Just in case, I will give you some more anedoctes.

I am currently teaching in a swedish university. When I fail someone, we have a special procedure to follow when we the student in question. We need to avoid over-reactions, which in turn may lead to a student filing for "depression" and getting extra welfare benefits.

Those who have passion for bashing "euro-socialism" may grind their axes to their heart's content, on these cases.

[Ed Oscuro]

Well, we get plenty of the downsides to such thinking over here, without any of the benefits.

A while back somebody was pointing to this "coddling" and cocooning of students from the realities of competition as a reason the U.S. is failing educationally. That said, I suppose class rankings might be counterproductive in too many cases, and some teachers are too narrowminded to understand the difference between making somebody the class goat, beyond just exhorting them to catch up with their peers. Of course, there the result is that good teachers lose a potential tool to help motivate competitive students, while bad teachers are simply insulated from making certain obvious mistakes that reveal why they should be fired...although in my experience the administration will more often than not go to bat for a clearly underperforming teacher.

[DrTrouserPlank]

There was a well publicised case in the UK (well it was on Jeremy Kyle show and in a couple of the papers) about a numbskull (who calls himself "mad-dog") who got a skull tattooed on his face. He was on benefits of course and still is. My problem with that is that he has to all intents and purposes made himself voluntarily unemployable, and seeing as the hand-outs he gets are laughably called "job-seekers allowance" I think in a case like that he should certainly lose it. In other cases such as council housing, if you make yourself "voluntarily homeless" (by choosing not to accept the nice free house they are offering you) then you actually lose a significant entitlement to further help.

The nutter in the article here is slightly different. Sadly it's more to do with a culture that is willing to diagnose everything as an addiction. Today if you apply the criteria to the problem and it matches the characteristics of addiction, then it's addiction; no matter how daft it is. There's no question that you can be addicted to some very daft things; it certainly doesn't have to be the vanilla brand of addiction that is drugs, alcohol, gambling etc. Things like OCD can be viewed as an addiction. You are addicted to obsessive behaviour, and I doubt there's many that would argue that it is a debilitating condition. That train of thinking simply gets extrapolated further and further outwards until it becomes seemingly farcical.

[Ed Oscuro]

My problem with that is that he has to all intents and purposes made himself voluntarily unemployable, and seeing as the hand-outs he gets are laughably called "job-seekers allowance" I think in a case like that he should certainly lose it. In other cases such as council housing, if you make yourself "voluntarily homeless" (by choosing not to accept the nice free house they are offering you) then you actually lose a significant entitlement to further help.

Most people here in the U.S. are on board with this, and I don't see that changing considering that we probably have challenges to funding public benefits that are probably as severe as in most parts of Europe.

Sadly it's more to do with a culture that is willing to diagnose everything as an addiction. Today if you apply the criteria to the problem and it matches the characteristics of addiction, then it's addiction; no matter how daft it is.

There was a public row recently over the latest proposed changes to the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual for psychiatry (for the DSM-V revision I believe) and many people were up in arms over the idea that it would loosen diagnoses so that it would be easier to medicate or even just stigmatize people who might not need or want special consideration. That being said, this facet of the battle seems to be part of an effort (perhaps a hopeless one) to try to find a hard and fast threshhold rule for treatment, but everybody can be somewhat different in ways that can confuse the criteria. It does best in clear-cut cases of insanity, of course, but then the test really seems to be something like "is this person doing something society that we don't like" instead of whatever the specific criteria says to look for.