Work and employment for people with psychiatric disabilities

Employment provides not only a monetary recompense but also ‘latent’ benefits — non-financial gains to the worker which include social identity and status; social contacts and support; a means of structuring and occupying time; activity and involvement; and a sense of personal achievement (Shepherd, 1989). [...]users of mental health services face more significant barriers to work than do people with other disabilities: only people with a severe learning disability find more difficulty in obtaining paid work. The shift in mental health services from large asylums to community-based services has meant that current responsibilities for providing work and employment activities for people with mental health problems are not clearly defined and allocated among various organisations dealing with health and employment issues, such as the National Health Service, local authority social service departments and the Department for Education and Skills. Associated services include pre-vocational training, user employment programmes in which mental health services seek positively to recruit and support service users (Perkins, 1998), and the ‘clubhouse model’, which has a ‘work-ordered’ day and organises transitional, paid work-experience placements (Beard et al, 1982).