On Your Employment as a Person with Mental Health Symptoms


Feeling that you are as good as the next person is vital to improving your mental health. In our capitalist society, the main source of recognition is the exchange of goods and services. Self-respect is more likely to become real in your life if you feel that you are accomplished.
Finding paying gigs that won’t land you in jail is one of the very best ways to put a smile on your face. Whatever you can do to plan a potential revenue stream and carry out the steps you have determined to be necessary to get yourself into a canoe riding upon it will make you more content, less absorbed in your ruminating terror, or whatever you need to have fewer mental health symptoms.
One of the skills that you have, that you use in a hobby or around the house and yard, can morph into a marketable skill, a job skill. It will take cooperation from the economy, as well as a bit of sheer luck.
It may well be that the only source of revenue you can obtain at this stage of your life is public benefits. While you receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), General Assistance (GA), or whatever, it is literally necessary in order for you to enjoy a longer life to develop a hobby or two. Sewing, wood-working, cooking, repairing engines, even computer-hacking, and so forth as to the creative hobbies, will give you pleasure now, and, as you develop your skills, can turn into sources of revenue. (And, with the possible exception of the computer-hacking, these hobbies will all save you money that you receive in public benefits.)
Watching television or surfing the web or playing computer games are, generally speaking, passive ways of whiling away the hours while encouraging you to spend money that you don’t have. Such hobbies do nothing to elicit the talents you have unless you figure out some entrepreneurial angle. Here’s the gist of how. Take notes on your passive activities and use your notes to teach others:
  • ·         Through some sort of tutoring
  • ·         By making a video and posting it on You Tube (you need bunches of videos before you can expect any revenue)
  • ·         By writing for publication (the competition is fierce)
  • ·         In speaking out in a peer support capacity and/or taking a leadership role in an agency that provides assistance to consumers.

Begin in your Planner a list of what you need to do to put employment in your future. Just a listing is all you need to do at this point. Adding to your list after you have entered one or two “tasks,” or benchmarks, is likely only to result in discouragement. Think about what you are now capable of starting to do. If you were recently hospitalized, don’t be too hasty in trying to return to employment. Get your lifestyle into the healthiest framework you can. That is your chief aim now.
Here are the most important vocational stepping-stones:
  • ·         Volunteering in a setting similar to the site where you worked before or want to work. Take any kind of job there (without pay other than the relationships you build up) and demonstrate that you can do a more complex job in that setting. (Express your ideas for improving routines and ways that work is done, without criticizing anyone but only being creative in meetings with your fellow/sister volunteers and the person who supervises you.) You may get a promotion!

  • ·         Considering how you can work for yourself as an entrepreneur or as a self-employed person. Truly, as a person with mental health symptoms, you will avoid much stigma and much stress in the corporate environment by doing this. If you are interested, I suggest that you become a client of your (US) State’s Vocational Rehabilitation Department. It will supervise your writing a business plan, and will provide you with start-up funds if it approves your plan!
  • o    Mainstream incubators for startups may well assail your senses. One did mine at one point; a word to the wise!

  • ·         (With or without Voc Rehab,) you may want to improve your educational background.
  • o    For online classes, a good summary was published on The Simple Dollar site on January 10, 2018: thesimpledollar.com/ten-excellent-online-courses-I-highly-recommend-and-they’re-all-free/ Author Trent Hamm has much wise advice here and elsewhere!
  • o    You may want to return to a degree program (in a formal classroom setting) or initiate a new one. (Voc Rehab will pay for this if it approves your rehabilitation plan.)
  • o    Or, you may decide on just one class or a few classes that you want to take (in a formal classroom setting.)


·        My advice to you, as a person reading and understanding my words, is that you are much too intelligent to enter a “supported employment” program. These are settings that provide training, counseling and referral services, and job-coaching. Absurdly little more than chance is the likelihood of a participant’s actually finding steady employment in the competitive market. An equal number of participants with mental health symptoms were unemployed (42.8%) as employed (43.1%) in the most recent study that I could find. Purvi Sevak and Shamimo Khan, “Psychiatric Versus Physical Disabilities: A Combination of Barriers and Facilitators to Employment,” Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal 2017, Vol. 40, No. 2, 163-171, Table 3 at 168. You easily could be dragged down to the least-common denominator of the most “involved” (read: disabled) clients of these programs.

Consider that set of prompts. What ideas does it give you for your life? Start a list in your Planner. Remember to undertake only one step at a time, "baby steps." But if you are at all interested in hooking up with your (US) State Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, a phone call to them after checking out their website is probably your best initial action.
If you have the opportunity to return to previous employment, see the article by Peter L Forster, MD, and me, "Returning to Work."
 (C) Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.



No comments:

Post a Comment

Hang On Till Tomorrow--Your Attention Will Probably Have Deflected from the Present Despair

Hang on until tomorrow because it can’t be the same bad as it was today, even if you don’t achieve a decent day. Why? Your life is not ...