What Have We Learnt About Mental Health and Employment?
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| Pages | 8-15 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13619322200600003 |
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Author | Jenny Secker,Bob Grove,Patience Seebohm |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
What Have We Learnt
About Mental Health
and Employment?
Jenny Secker
Professor of Mental Health
Anglia Ruskin University & South Essex
Partnership NHS Trust
Bob Grove
Director, Employment Programme
Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health
Patience Seebohm
Project Manager, Employment Programme
Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health
Framework Feature
he last time the Mental Health Review
focused on employment was over four years ago, in
December 2001 (Boardman, 2001). In the intervening
years interest in mental health and employment has
grown apace, fuelled in part by the Social Exclusion
Unit’s report on mental health and social exclusion
(ODPM, 2004) and the government’s Pathways to
Work pilots aimed at supporting incapacity benefit
recipients back to work.
That growing interest was noted by the editors at
Radcliffe Publishing who invited us to submit an
outline for a new book drawing together UK and
international research and practice evidence with the
experience of service users. New Thinking about Mental
Health and Employment was published by Radcliffe in
July 2005 (Grove et al,2005). In this article we
summarise some of the contributions to the book by
way of a ‘taster’.
Clearly, we could not include everything here and
in particular we have not been able to capture the
wealth of experience service-user contributors brought
to their chapters. In the book we learn at first hand
from these authors how important work is in making
us feel valued (and therefore valuable) by providing
social contact and simply ‘keeping us going’. Wealso
learn how the wrong job can contribute to or
compound mental health problems when managers
Tand colleagues are unsupportive and feedback is not
given about how we are doing. If for no other reason it
is worth reading the book for these vivid illustrations.
What we have been able to include hereare
summaries of the evidence from research and practice.
In the following section we examine the evidence
regarding who can benefit from vocational
interventions, service users’ motivation to work, how
people can be helped to find and keep a job and how
unemployment can be prevented in the first place. We
then turn to the practice evidence to show how
effective services aimed at supporting service users to
return to or retain contact with the labour market can
be developed.
The research evidence
Who can benefitfrom vocational interventions?
Research in the vocational rehabilitation field over the
last few decades has been predominantly North
American, and was originally driven largely by a
concern to find out which service users would respond
best to vocational interventions. Diagnosis, symptoms,
hospitalisation history, employment history and a
range of psychological factors have all been examined,
but these factors have been shown to have little
bearing on who can benefitfrom supportto get back
8The Mental Health Review Volume 11 Issue 1 March 2006 ©Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) 2006
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