EQOLISE study finds Individual Placement and Support approach is effective in helping people with severe mental illness obtain competitive employment

People with severe mental illness face many challenges in securing paid work, and employment rates are low. For example, a five-country European study by Knapp et al (2002) found less than a quarter of people with schizophrenia were in paid employment, the proportion being as low as 5% in London. The economic and social impacts of employment difficulties are enormous. For individuals, it can mean long-term reliance on state welfare benefits, insecure low-paid work, and a disability trap that makes it hard to escape. For the broader society, the impacts are the risk of an almost permanently marginalized, socially excluded group of people, and high costs: productivity losses because of unemployment or absenteeism account for a large proportion of the overall cost of schizophrenia across many countries.