Applying for benefits is anxiety-inducing - and the weird language makes it much worse | Zoe Williams

The staff are really helpful, but stark warnings, unnecessary cliffhangers and demonising language in the application forms all add up to unnecessary stress, writes Zoe Williams

It’s been five or six weeks since me, my stepmother, P, and my stepbrother, D, started the process of moving him from his old benefits on to universal credit, and I have a lot, and I mean a lot, of thoughts about this system, not all of them bad. D is severely mentally ill and – this is the not-bad bit – everyone at universal credit is incredibly helpful and understanding about who they’re dealing with. They respect his privacy and take the time to make sure P and I are authorised to help, while not erecting needless barriers around talking to us. They’ll sit on the phone listening to all three of us bicker, they’ll put up with P absolutely refusing to be known by her given name, even though that’s the one on all her bank accounts. They are nice.

The online forms are very plainly written, except for odd bits of language. There are stark warnings about losing all your benefits with a wrong answer, which is needlessly stressful. You wouldn’t do that on a GCSE. There are unnecessary cliffhangers, such as “Have you been out of the UK in the past two years?” – you have to click “yes” even if it’s just a day trip to Calais, with no way of knowing whether the next page will say, “Wrong answer, chum, you are no longer entitled to anything.” (In fact the next page is full of modifiers, such as “for less than two weeks”, and everything is fine.)

They talk constantly about “migrating” to universal credit; the necessity of migrating in a timely manner; the dire consequences of non-migration. But this is a pretty loaded word now, so after a couple of hours of this, D was asking whether he was going to get sent to Rwanda, and yes, initially he was joking, but once the anxiety had planted itself, he wasn’t.

Find me anyone with a severe mental illness in which one of the components is not anxiety. Find me anyone who relies on benefits of any kind, after the past 15 years of random acts of political vandalism, media demonisation, and one lot pandering to another lot with tough talk, who isn’t made anxious enough already by any interaction, without the language of yet another demonised out-group getting thrown into the mix.

It’s made bearable by the people on the end of the phone, but it shouldn’t have to skate so close to unbearable in the first place.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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