When we don’t consider people’s lives in context, in their entirety, we design policy that manifestly fails. People on health related benefits are invariably suffering deeply yet we design inappropriate and simplistic policy to address this and choose to isolate them and stigmatise them. This costs them and it costs us. We do it because our understanding of human change is often superficial or ignored when we develop our responses to human problems. We can and should do it differently and better.