Another “May is Mental Health Month” has come and gone, and it is time to build on years of awareness campaigns and move into action to promote whole health and recovery. People with serious mental health conditions are dying on average 25 years earlier than the general population, largely due to preventable physical health conditions, so why do we still focus on mental health separately from physical health? And when we know that people with serious mental health conditions face an 80 percent unemployment rate, why do we largely ignore the role of poverty, economic and social inequality, and other environmental factors in mainstream discussions about mental health?
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In my country, there has been a government campaign to popularize the idea that mentally ill people are perfectly capable of holding a job, possibly with some exra attention. There have also been several stories in the media here about the specific strengths of people with autism for specific types of jobs, mostly checking things in production but also in coding. I didn’t notice anything specifically about schizophrenics but I suppose it helps.
That seems rather optimistic. I’m sure some people would be happy to hold down a job as librarian or gardener, but to promote it generally, well we will have to see. It sounds like austerity gone wild again, tbh.
It is not so much aimed at pushing the mentally ill towards jobs, but rather at awareness and removing prejudice at the side of employers, I think. Such that those mentally ill who want to work and seem capable of doing so will find a workplace in which they do not have to hide anything. The campaign has a website on which employers can fill in some questions that confront them with possible prejudice and ignorance. It also comes attached with a sign-up form in which companies declare that they are open to hiring people with a mental illness. The list of companies that have declared so is public for everyone to see on the website. I think it would be very comforting to see one’s future employer on such a list. It might even be decisive in applying for a job in the first place. This does not seem like austerity to me. Not everyone is happy to rake in the disability, some of the mentally ill desperately want to work and get on with a ‘normal’ life. Such a campaign might facilitate that, however limited it may be