A new report released on Thursday revealed that adults with serious mental illnesses - although 60% want to work and 40% can succeed with the appropriate support - experience an 80% unemployment rate in the US. A state-by-state analysis of employment of the mentally ill provides the statistics.
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, adults who suffer from a number of ailments face a significant disadvantage in the workforce. In addition to a high unemployment rate, only 1.7% of this group of people received supported employment services in 2012. This leaves them subjected to expensive public programs, such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Income (SSDI).
The statistics varied from each state, with an unemployment rate high of 92.6% in Maine and a low of 56% in Wyoming. One of the reasons contributing to this unusually high rate is the rarity of supported employment programs due to a lack of funding. The researchers gathered their data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which is based on numbers from 2012. A total of 32 states had unemployment rates for the mentally ill higher than 80%.
"It isn't surprising," said Sita Diehl, director of state policy at NAMI and author of the report, in this Washington Post article. "We knew that mental health services really took it on the chin during the recession. Employment rates had already been dismal to begin with, and when the supports were eroded, people with mental illness lost support and lost jobs."
The researchers note that this unemployment rate is likely higher because they did not take into account over 500,000 people who have mental illnesses and are either homeless or in jail. The lack of employment support can lead to homelessness for this demographic of people. According to Robert Drake, a professor at the Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center, a year of supported employment for a mentally ill worker costs about $4,000. Such a program consists of job coaches who help these people cope with the demands of their new vocation, and the gradual disappearance of these programs is actually costing the mental health industry even more money.
As a result of this sobering research, USA Today has opted to publish a series of stories in the coming months that will examine human and financial costs that the US must pay because of the 10 million mentally ill persons that are uncared for.
You can read more about the unemployment rate among mentally ill US citizens in this USA Today article.
