Links
to resources:
Removing the barriers: The facts about mental health and
employment
Briefing
40, Centre for Mental Health, August 2009
This briefing looks at the barriers to
employment for people with both common and severe mental health
problems and at the initiatives that are being undertaken by the
public, voluntary and commercial sectors to support their efforts
to find and sustain work. Stigma and discrimination in the
workplace is one of the major barriers to employment reviewed in
the briefing.
Rethink
Scores of
British adults avoid talking to their boss about mental health
problems out of fear of losing their job or being considered “mad”,
new findings suggest.
Rethink is a mental health membership charity
which works to help everyone affected by severe mental illness to
recover a better quality of life. It carried out a survey
which found that almost 60% of British workers said they would feel
uncomfortable talking to their line manager if they had a mental
health condition such as depression, anxiety or bipolar
disorder.
Time to Change - Let’s end
mental health discrimination
Time to Change is an ambitious programme to
end discrimination faced by people who experience mental health
problems. It is run by the mental health charities, MIND and
Rethink. The website includes blogs on topics such as
employment issues. This blog gives an insight into the
challenges of finding and staying in work with a mental health
condition.
The
working in partnership section of the website includes ideas,
resources and case studies of how health and care professionals can
challenge discrimination in the workplace.
Mental health and
employment
Roy Sainsbury, Annie
Irvine, Jane Aston, Sally Wilson, Ceri Williams and Alice Sinclair,
2008
Department for
Work and Pensions, Research Report No. 513
This report summarises research carried out by
the Social Policy Research Unit and Institute for Employment
Studies University of York on behalf of the Department for Work and
Pensions. It found that there was a perception among
employees that employers viewed people with mental health
conditions as a ‘risk’ or as unreliable or incapable of coping in
their job, and this was a factor in some people’s reluctance to
mention a mental health condition to their current, or a potential
future, employer.
Chartered Institute of Personnel Development
(CIPD)
Annual
Survey Report 2010, Absence Management
This report of the 11th annual
survey carried out among 573 organisations. The report
provides benchmarking data for organisations on absence levels and
the cost and causes of absence. This year there are topical
sections about employee wellbeing and the effect of the economic
climate on absence.
Realising
ambitions: Better employment support for people with a mental
health condition
Rachel Perkins, Paul
Farmer and Paul Litchfield
Department for
Work and Pensions, December 2009
This review was commissioned by the Secretary
of State for Work and Pensions to look at mental health and
employment and to identify how Government could help people with
mental health conditions fulfil their employment ambitions.
Chapter 4 of the report
sets out practical steps that health and welfare to work services
can take to support people with a mental health condition.
These include identifying ‘link workers’ in each agency (e.g.
Disability Employment Advisers in Jobcentre Plus and employment
specialists in health and social services), joint seminars and
training sessions as well as exchange placements.
The report also notes the paucity of
occupational health service provision in UK workplaces with just
34% of mainly public sector and large private sector companies
having access to such services. Nevertheless occupational
health service providers can help to ensure that recruitment
procedures do not discriminate against people with mental health
conditions.
|