Well!
I just finished a 4 day course on how to implement Supported Employment. This is where you have a top-down system to support employment of people with mental illness. We are 25% of the population, and only 10% of us have jobs. 75% of us want jobs, but for one reason or another, can’t get one. We could be held back by family or friends, fear that we would lose our benefits, or even our mental health support staff (case manager, et.al.) could be discouraging us.
This program shows through several studies that a person with mental illness getting a job has no down side and a lot of positive things. Like improvement of symptom control, self-esteem, and so on. If you thought job stresses might put someone with mental illness back in the hospital, you’d be wrong. The major problem is the paradigm shift everyone would have to undergo in order to make it happen. Executives and bean counters need to see that there is no additional cost if you get rid of those time wasting day treatment programs, case managers, psychologists and psychiatrists need to stop seeing them as “their” patients and “they” are too whatever to work.
Now this doesn’t work for everybody, you can’t put every person with mental illness to work. But you can at least try to do it with those that want to. And like I said, that is 75% of the mentally ill.
Now, my rant.
For my work day, I normally keep the radio on and listen to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and then Dave Ramsey. Those guys talk from 8 to 5. But my local radio station, for some reason, has decided to extend the morning news show an extra hour, over the first hour of Glenn Beck. This has upset me quite a lot. It is a disruption to my routine, and I don’t like it. I have emailed my displeasure to the radio station, but I am being ignored. I guess I’ll have to take it up with their local talk show, Mike Fleming, who I can’t stand any more.
Back to your regular programming.