About the event

This is a jointly hosted seminar between the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine.

From both testimonies of claimants and wider research, it is clear that the UK welfare system can be damaging to mental health. Yet despite this accumulated knowledge, we have several gaps in our vision of what a mental health-promoting welfare system might look like in the UK and other high-income countries - gaps that have so far been mainly glossed over by researchers, policymakers and claimants.

In this presentation, Ben Baumberg Geiger aims to start a discussion about the future agenda of research on welfare and mental health in high-income countries, using a mixture of his own research, wider research and claimants' expertise. This will consider:

• the generosity of benefits and the role of disability extra cost benefits (e.g. PIP)
• conditionality and sanctioning
• the challenge of judging claimants' work capacity
• non-take-up, accessibility and stigma.

Rather than providing definitive answers, Ben's goal is to prompt collective discussions about where researchers should be concentrating their efforts, to help us achieve both a better understanding and a better social security system in the UK and beyond.

Note that this session will be recorded.

How to join this event

This event will be held online on Zoom. Please register your free place here: https://bit.ly/39RGjIs

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join the seminar.

About the speaker

Ben Baumberg Geiger will join the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine (GHSM) and the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health (CSMH) at King's College London in August 2022, helping to co-lead the programme on work and welfare reform (he is currently a Reader in Sociology & Social Policy at the University of Kent).

His mixed-methods research largely focuses on mental health, disability, benefits and work in high-income countries. He spent much of the past decade reviewing international evidence to propose a better disability assessment in the UK, including on secondment in the DWP itself in 2015-16, and culminating in the 2018 report A Better WCA is Possible. He currently co-leads the Welfare at a (Social) Distance project 2020-22, which investigates the UK benefits system during the COVID-19 pandemic, funded by the ESRC as part of UKRI's rapid response to COVID-19.