'Disability Trouble?': exploring autoethnography and policy analysis to question the Work Capability Assessment used as a gateway to social security in the United Kingdom

This thesis identifies over 3,000 people who have committed suicide as a direct result of the Work Capability Assessment used as a gateway to Employment Support Allowance. Central to the ethos of this thesis is the attempt to restore humanity to those people who have been forced to make the ultimate choice. A critical literature review explores the intersections of Queer Theory, Disability Studies, Politics, and International Human Rights Law. That review generates three research questions that both interrogate the Work Capability Assessment and the utility of Queer Theory as an emancipatory methodology. Following Durkheim (1996 [1897]), suicide in this thesis is understood as sociological, not just psychological. Inspired by Queer Theory, auto-ethnographic methods are employed to analyse three narratives. Those three narratives consist of a brief history and description of the author’s Disability and impairments, an emotive discourse on an assessment by a health care professional and finally an emotive discourse of a benefits tribunal. The subsequent chapter analyses and engages with Employment Support Allowance as policy and legislation, then focuses on Regulation 27 that acts as a safety net. Despite that safety net, a statistical analysis developing Barr et al’s 2016 study exposes at least 3000 suicides. To restore humanity to data and statistics, the 'Deaths By Welfare' research project provides the names of some people who have died in connection with Social Security in the United Kingdom. Those names are memorialised to signify the majority of names that cannot be recorded. The final chapter predicts that further deaths will occur as a result of the paradoxes within the Social Security assessment process. A language of description is arrived at to provide a possible source by which suicidal ideation can be rendered both personally and socially.