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.
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