Sainsbury’s funds support the psychiatrists behind the Work Capability and forthcoming PIP assessments.

Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts (and more recently, particularly the Linbury Trust) have long funded a group of psychiatrists which has developed the ‘Biopsychosocial’ (BPS) ‘Model’ of disability.

This is roundly condemned by the disability movement as being another individual model of disability with no relationship whatsoever to the barriers we face in society. 

You might reasonably wonder what psychiatry has to do with improving access to transport, buildings, information and so on.

It has all been encouraged by Unum, an insurance company, which particularly claims to help disabled people into work and offers them employment insurance. 

Unum has been widely discredited in the US where it was condemned for falsely denying rightful claims and a host of other misdeeds, but has already started advertising in the UK.

Unum Provident (as it was then) became alarmed by the number of claims for ME.

Since then its pet academic psychiatrists, particularly Simon Wessely, have worked tirelessly to develop the BPS model and persuade the medical establishment and governments that ME and its related conditions (like Fibromyalgia) are mental, not physical health problems. 

Somehow, the Medical Research Council has apparently been persuaded to lock away from public access, documents showing clear physical causes of ME –  until 2071!

Wessely is also a Corporate Officer of PRISMA, which funds ‘rehabilitation’ of Unum policy holders.  Apart from any other clauses that prevent payments, claims are not paid out unless claimants have subjected themselves to one of these courses.

One of the main proponents of the BPS model of disability is the Chief Medical Advisor to the Department for Work and Pensions, Professor Sir Michael Aylward, who just happens to head up the Unum Centre for research into BPS at Cardiff University. 

Every aspect of the BPS model of disability is doing untold harm to thousands of disabled people, since it now underpins the Work Capability Assessments and the new Personal Independence Payment criteria. 

Both of these absolutely and resolutely ignore the impact of barriers to our inclusion, in line with the BPS model.

Help stop it now, by boycotting Sainsbury’s shops and banking and choking off the funding. 

This is just the beginning!

We will be organising further economic boycotts against Unum and AtoS very shortly – calling on investors to divest all of their shareholdings in these unethical, toxic ‘brands’! 

~ Black Triangle