Supported employment for adults with psychiatric disability: Results of an innovative demonstration project.

Abstract

Meeting the vocational needs of adults with mental illness is one of the most critical issues currently facing mental health planners and policymakers. An extensive technology has been developed for one such service: supported employment (Danley & Anthony, 1987). This paper reports on an innovative three-year research and demonstration project which was designed to evaluate a supported employment program on a university campus designed specifically for persons with psychiatric disability. Twenty participants were enrolled in the intervention; enrollment was staggered and occurred over a period of 12 months. The vocational status, job satisfaction, work integration, symptomatalogy, and social supports of participants were assessed during the project, and a two-year follow-up of employment status was conducted. Based upon the experience of project staff, conclusions were that while a university setting was an ideal one in which to provide supported employment services for persons with psychiatric disabilities, the university itself was not a particularly receptive or compatible employer. Several project participants obtained employment in university-vendored sites. The follow-up after two years showed that 10 of the subjects were employed an average of 17.5 hours per week with mean earnings of $156 per week. This represents a modest increase in percentage of subjects employed, and a substantial increase in average hours worked and average wages earned. Most important, participants in the study strongly valued the attractive and nonstigmatizing site of the program. Meeting the vocational needs of persons with psychiatric disabilities is one of the most critical issues currently facing mental health planners and policymakers. Programs for persons with psychiatric disabilities must offer real opportunities for growth and success in an environment which is supportive but nonstigmatizing (Anthony & Blanch, 1987). Supported employment is one such approach: It is characterized by a goal of paid work in integrated job settings with whatever ongoing support is necessary to maintain employment over time (Will, 1984). Most supported employment programs include job placement, job site training, monitoring and follow-up, and provide some variation of individual job placement, work crews, or enclaves (Wehman & Kregel, 1985). Supported employment programs generally provide skills’ training only after a job placement is made. The extensive technology that has been developed to provide supported employment to people with developmental disabilities has been adapted for other disabilities (Bellamy, Rhodes, & Albin, 1986; Wehman, Kregel, & Shafer, 1989) and modifications of these approaches have been suggested for people with psychiatric disabilities (Danley & Mellen, 1987; Trotter, Minkhoff, Harrison, & Hoops, 1988). This paper reports on an innovative three-year project designed to implement and evaluate a supported employment program for adults with psychiatric disabilities on a university campus.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.