Feature
The job cure
by Alex Spence
The obstacles to returning to the workforce for someone with a mental illness can be great. What can we do to rectify this?
The past two years haven’t been the happiest of Wally Bernard’s life. His father was jailed for sexually abusing two of his sisters. His girlfriend had an abortion against his wishes, and they broke up. Then there was a serious car accident. Unable to cope, Wally was diagnosed with clinical depression. “It was extremely traumatic,” he says. “The stress just got too much.”
A chef whose resumé includes stints at Harbourside and Sky City in Auckland, Wally (not his real name) didn’t have much motivation for anything, let alone working. He left his job as head chef at a resort in Tauranga. At 35, he found himself alone, childless and unemployed, living on a sickness benefit of $190 a week, unable to envisage a future. “You get up every morning and wonder why,” he says. “You just slowly close up your life.” Last Christmas, he thought about hanging himself.
In the past few months, though, Wally has been slowly putting his life back together. He moved to a new town, Thames, where he found a supportive psychologist and an understanding landlord. He has also returned to work. A busy à la carte restaurant offered him a one-month trial: 20 hours a week at $9 an hour. It’s not much, but it’s something. As a result, Wally has felt his spirits lifting, his enthusiasm returning – for cooking and for life. “Basically, it’s like I never stepped out of the kitchen,” he says. “I’m doing mains and stuff, doing entrées right through to desserts. It’s like I haven’t been away from the kitchen at all.”
This is no small thing. The obstacles to returning to the workforce for someone with a mental illness can be great: there’s the stigma, to begin with, and the fact that mental illness by its very nature robs you of confidence and optimism. In more practical terms, many of the psychiatric medications cause lethargy and inattentiveness, and awkward explanations are required for long gaps in your employment history. For Wally, returning to a job he loves has been the difference between misery and hope, between lassitude and a future beyond depression, but he admits he probably couldn’t have done it on his own.
The change came after he was referred to Workwise, a small Hamilton-based employment agency, which helped him put together a CV, and arranged interviews with several restaurants in Thames. A support worker from Workwise even accompanied him to the interviews. (It took only two interviews before he was hired.)
One of only a handful of employment agencies in New Zealand dealing exclusively with clients with a mental illness, Workwise is representative of a changing philosophy among mental health services in New Zealand: upbeat, idealistic, dedicated to the notion that people with mental illness are capable of achieving as much as anyone else in society. Open employment, the thinking goes, is one of the fundamental components of recovery, along with family support, medication and adequate housing. The mentally ill want to work, and they have a right to. “Real jobs for real pay” has become the rallying cry.
Until now, despite international evidence demonstrating that the mentally ill are capable of holding down skilled, high-pressure jobs provided they have access to the right kind of treatment and support, it has simply been assumed they are incapable of functioning in a “normal” workplace. As a result, an appalling number of mental health consumers are unemployed and living in poverty.
In mid-June, an investigation by the British Government found that only 21 percent of long-term mental health consumers in the UK were employed, while a person who had been out of work for more than six months because of a psychiatric disorder had only a 50 percent chance of ever returning to work. No such detailed survey has been conducted in New Zealand, but the situation is believed to be comparable. Currently, 44,688 people receive a sickness or invalid’s benefit after receiving a psychiatric diagnosis, and more than 80 percent of those receiving an invalid’s benefit have been on it for more than two years.
What little work there is available to someone with a severe mental illness is typically menial, transient and poorly paid. In the past, many people were encouraged to participate in “sheltered workshops”, factory-like environments in which they were expected to perform tedious jobs like packaging headsets for airlines or putting stickers on video-cassettes, for which they received as little as $50 on top of their benefit.
The workshops were of limited value either financially or therapeutically. (There are still 3500 people with various kinds of disabilities working in sheltered workshops around the country, though the government is changing the legislation to force the workshops to conform to the requirements of ordinary workplaces, including adhering to minimum wage laws.)
Organisations such as Workwise, however, are now pushing a concept termed “supported employment” – which is to say, assisting people into real jobs in integrated workplaces, rather than ghettoised in sub-standard jobs specifically for people with disabilities. Why patronise and limit someone’s future merely because they suffer a mental illness?
“We’re clear that it’s not just about any job, it’s about the right job for the person,” says Jacqui Graham, director of Workwise. “That’s what we focus on. Finding out what people really want to do and helping them get there.”
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