Amid the headlines and politics, what’s the truth behind mental health and unemployment?

Julie’s seen it all. She’s been heading up our employability programmes for about as long as we’ve had them, and worked in the field long before that. Like many of our team, she’s seen people hit despair, lose hope, find hope again, and take just about every bend in the path to meaningful employment after mental health struggles.

What’s she’s not seen much of is people who just don’t want to take that path at all. Around two thirds of the people that our employability projects have offered support to over the last year have put serious time and effort into working with our team to find a path forward. The majority of those have been able to get back into work, training or volunteering. They’re on their way.

We live in an era where political discourse treats unemployment rates as a sort of badge of honour for policy – if the number goes down, the story goes, everything is better. And that political pressure brings with it frustration, and a desire to find reasons why the magic number won’t increase. The easy answer is to tell ourselves people don’t want to work. It’s simpler than asking more questions.

“It’s the easiest thing in the world to just push someone into a job,” Julie sighs. “But how’s that affecting their lives? How do you make that employment stick? Has anything actually changed from what stopped them being able to work in the first place?”

We put a poster up in a GP’s surgery recently; a bit of a community hub in an age where there’s often little left that will serve better. It caught the eye of one man who got in touch to say that he felt stuck in a bit of a groundhog-day experience.

Having lost his job following a rough patch with his mental health, he has repeatedly tried to get back into employment – but each time, employers haven’t quite understood what he needed, or haven’t made reasonable adjustments. So when his mental health worsened again, and he needed to take time off, he was let go.

He’s trying, again and again, and it’s not working. The cycle turns.

“I have found working alongside mental health difficulties to be challenging over the years,” says Sarah. “There’s the pressure of knowing that if I have a bad day, I would still have to show up, and if I took too many sick days, I would lose my job.”

Eventually, like the man in the GP’s waiting room, the cycle got too much – and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder didn’t convey much to employers. The popular ‘mental health first aid’ approach didn’t tell them much, either – there’s no advice there about how to support people, why staff might need time off, or what to do when that happens.

Sarah came to Platfform to volunteer, eager to keep doing something that would help give a sense of purpose, even if it wasn’t paid work. The need to belong and matter is a fundamental human motivation; decades of research is clear on this. It is almost as compelling as the need for food. Some of us just need a little more support to get there.

And an understanding of what we need is a big part of that support  – so when a Peer Mentor asked what Sarah would like to be doing, she already had an answer. “I would like to help people who have gone through things like I have in my life. I feel I can understand them better.”

Very soon after Sarah was supported to apply for a position on our team – to re-enter employment. She’s was successful in the application, and got the job. “Working with people who understand you takes away the pressure that would normally make you ill,” she says.

“You no longer have to end up being ill from worrying about being ill.”

This isn’t an unusual story, and it’s far from being the only barrier to entering the workplace that struggling with your mental health can present. Unemployment brings difficulty in affording travel to interviews, or even having the clothes to work. One problem brings another, and another.

The assumption goes that if more people are in work, then more people are living good lives. But employment figures don’t tell us how sustainable the employment is. How meaningful it is. Or whether, each day, someone is being entrenched deeper in their mental health struggles for fear of being thought ‘workshy’, of simply ‘not trying enough,’ if those struggles become too much.

Political stories that reinforce this fear, and that suggest that people routinely choose to exaggerate their mental health challenges to actively avoid work, don’t help. They just dot the road back to employment with more potholes; more stigma, more shame, more barriers to support. Putting more strain on public services rather than less.

Mind have outlined this in their excellently detailed response to comments by Government figures that have spread their way across the media. And Mind make an important point: if you want to resolve mental-health related unemployment, starting with the ‘unemployment’ end is doing things backwards.

But even improving access to mental health services won’t change much if those services aren’t able to provide holistic support – to get to the root of distress, and the circumstances that prevent or hinder long-term change.

When it comes to mental health affecting employment we need to be looking at workplaces, and the expectations on employees and employers. The approaches often used aren’t working – some research shows that mental health first aid training, for example, may not be of much help. It’s just not getting deep enough into understanding the challenges that people can face.

If workplaces understood mental health better, and were better able to look after their employees, then more people would be able to retain good mental health, feel supported when that’s not possible, and continue working.

If that doesn’t happen, more of us will get trapped in cycles of poor mental health and unemployment. And no amount of positive thinking, of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, is going to change that.

“I struggled with anxiety and depression from a young age,” explains Oliver. “I suffered childhood trauma and neglect. It affected my confidence, and that stopped me from trying new things. Phil at Platfform understands me, and listens to me. That’s helped me understand myself better. I’m now volunteering, which is amazing. I now feel I can be positive about getting a job.”

Jessie’s been through something similar. “I’ve been helped to feel safe about opening up about my day to day difficulties. They’ve also helped me with the outside world, boosting my confidence with everyday activities, and towards my future career.”

For Sophie, connection has been key – the feeling of not being alone within difficult times. “I’ve been supported through being connected to groups and courses that have helped build my confidence and helped me with my overall wellbeing.”

Often, as a society, we have a tendency to think about mental health challenges as something wrong with you, as an individual. But that’s not true. It’s about what’s happened to you, or what should have happened but didn’t. It’s about the experiences you’ve had, and the circumstances you face now. When that’s your understanding, you can start to see some answers. Not easy ones – but ones that contain hope.

Holistic understanding of mental health and support has been a big factor for many people; an approach that looks at the wider picture of people’s lives, and aims to understand the web of challenges and difficulties that can prevent people from moving forwards.

It’s why employment alone isn’t a cure-all, or an automatic ticket to a better life. Sustainable transitions to work, the right conditions to make that employment last, and mental health support that doesn’t close the door once things start to improve: these things can be the foundations of a better future – to a point where people feel able to forge their own path forwards, and find belonging, purpose and meaning.

But the projects that help build these conditions are at risk if their funding isn’t protected – a particular worry considering how the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (the intended replacement for the European Social Fund) is set to end soon, with many projects uncertain of their future.

That future needs to be secured; we’ve seen these approaches work. Belonging, purpose and meaning are something we all want. Given a genuine choice between good mental health and bad, and between employment and unemployment , no-one is making a conscious and deliberate decision to pick the latter. And we shouldn’t pretend that they are.

“She’s happy now,” Julie says, remembering a young woman she worked with some time ago, “Got a family too. But the Community Mental Health Nurse had said that she’d never work again. I wasn’t so sure.”

This young woman had her heart set on a specific career path. She even had many of the qualifications needed. But she was also facing some major challenges with her mental health – and these turned into roadblocks. She was required to attend regular mental health support, but these appointments couldn’t be shifted – and interviewers and employers couldn’t work around them.

There are conversations that can be had. Logistics to be worked out, even within inflexible systems. The Equalities Act makes some provisions for reasonable adjustment, for example, although recent advice from the WHO and UN would class mental health challenges under the social model of disability, potentially help these provisions go further.

But when the barriers within your own health are propped up, sandbagged by the barriers presented by the world outside, where’s the escape route? How do you make a start? And if the support you’re receiving doesn’t seem to be fighting your corner, how can you do that on your own?

There wasn’t a straightforward answer. But ultimately, it took some careful support, built around personal requirements, to mean that this young woman could manage both things alongside each other. It needed some thought, some patience, and a willingness to actually look at someone’s life, to understand what was happening there.

“Still see her from time to time,” says Julie. “Still see her about.

Yeah, she’s happy now.”

If you’re out of work following a difficult period of time with your mental health, Platfform can offer support in Gwent, Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan. Get in touch via gwentoows@platfform.org

For similar support in Swansea, drop us a line at pathwaysswansea@platfform.org

If you’re an employer looking to better understand mental health, and how your organisation can build an effective wellbeing strategy tailored to your teams, visit platfformwellbeing.com