'Bleak Picture' For Mentally Ill: 80% Are Jobless

Eighty percent of people with mental illness are unemployed, a statistic that says more about the lack of support for this group of people than it does about the economy, according to a new study.  As in so many other areas of mental health, solutions to this problem exist, but simply aren’t utilized, says Mary Giliberti, executive director of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  “These statistics paint a pretty bleak picture,” she says. “We think we can do a lot better.”

About 60% of people with mental illness want to work. And two-thirds can successfully hold down a job, if they’re given appropriate support, the report says. Yet fewer than 2% of people in the public mental health system receive this help, a cost-effective program called supported employment, which has been studied in 20 high-quality clinical trials over the past 25 years.  

Yet supported employment programs are rare, partly because of the difficulty of cobbling together sufficient funding, says Robert Drake, a professor at the Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center in New Hampshire. Unlike medication, which is covered by health insurance plans, there’s no central funding source for employment support.  Although the payoffs to helping people with mental illness succeed in the workplace are enormous, achieving that goal will “take both leadership and resources,” Giliberti says...