Psychosocial Profile of Persons with Mental Illness Seeking Supported Employment Services in a Tertiary Rehabilitation Facility in India

Pages: 261-265
Harshal Haridas1, E. Aravind Raja2, Sivakumar Thanapal3, Sekar Kasi4, and Sherin Yohannan5 (Department of Psychiatric Social Work, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, Karnataka1,2,4,5, Department of Psychiatry, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, Karnataka3)

People suffering from mental illness experience high rates of unemployment. Many personal, family and socio-environmental factors contribute to the difficulty to obtain and retain employment. A rehabilitation facility through its vocational intervention can help persons with mental illness (PMI) to achieve and retain employment in the community and turn improves their functioning. This study tries to identify the psycho-social profile of persons seeking Supported Employment (SE) in a tertiary rehabilitation centre. Participants were recruited from Sakalwara Residential Services (SRS) after seeking written consent and ethics committee approval from NIMHANS. 67 individual who sought SE services were included in the study. A socio-demographic datasheet and vocational assessment proforma prepared by the researcher was used for data collections. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data using SPSS (V.21). Most of the participants were single (85.1%), male (98.5%) and diagnosed with Schizophrenia (68.7%). Even though 38.8% of the participants had a Bachelors degree of some sort, 31.3% were never employed. As a result of the interventions provided, 51 individuals out of 67 were employed in various employment sectors in the community for 37.04 ± 17.29 days at an average remuneration of 291 ± 95.96 per day. Though most of the PMI wanted to work, due to lack of resources and environmental barriers, they are not able to find work by themselves. If the right opportunities, support and work environment is provided to the PMI irrespective of the bio-psycho-social profile they can work and earn in the community. It shows that with little support from the SE facilitators, most of the participants were able to find employment during their time of admission.