Employment Issues

The Return to Work Project: A Case Study (mine)

The following is a somewhat lengthy article I wrote for consideration by the Suresearch writing group at CEIMH Birmingham. In the group we shared observations that employment issues for those with mental health issues are beset by any number of challenges and obstacles. None of these are appropriately addressed or sensitively managed in the latest drive to remove numbers from the incapacity benefit statistics. In the group we discussed the possibility of using the following as the start of a blog, to open up debate around these issues, provide a forum for shared experiences and reflections. I hope that by posting it on this blog MissionMiraculous we may be able to get underway with this idea.

As you will see, the essay was written last August. There are updates. I shall post an update for it within the next week. Please use the comments box to share your responses, experiences and concerns.


On beginning to recover from severe depression this spring I became focussed, almost obsessively, on the goal of returning to work. I haven’t been in regular work since 1999, due to mental health problems (I have bi-polar disorder and have been in hospital numerous times since 1997), so this has been a major decision for me.

However, my older daughter was due to leave school in July to begin university, so my income was due to drop significantly – I needed to find a way to replace the lost income. In addition I had become aware that a significant factor in sustaining my depressions was my social isolation. And guilt feelings that I haven’t been earning my own keep have haunted me ever since I was taken out of work.

I have spent the vast majority of the last ten years in the company of me, myself and I. No pressure to decorate myself in anyway; to fit myself into time schedules, to look forward to anyone needing me between 8 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon; and, in the last few years, frequently little requirement for my company or attention in the evening beyond providing a meal and delivering drinks to various parts of the house.

I imagine a good percentage of men and women under these circumstances show the sort of self-respect that finds them and their homes and gardens in readiness ‘for inspection’ at any time. These people, who I admire and envy, probably have training schedules and proactive project activities that shape their days and weeks and if asked could log lists of their achievements in the face of the challenges they face due to their mental health difficulties.

I do more than take my hat off to these people. I bow and scrape to their dignity, their self-respect, self possession and tenacity. I feel humiliated and ashamed by my lack of these qualities once stripped of the illusion that I ever possessed them in the first place.

I have not, then, been one of those people. I have shown myself what a worthless, pointless space taker I have felt myself to be. I do the absolute necessities at home and nothing else. As a puppy our dog used the top of the landing for a wee whenever unobserved and the carpet’s never been the same since. In the summer there’s a distinct aroma that appeals to no-one but him – I notice it, I shudder, I look at leaflets about carpet cleaning that come through the door and put them away in ‘must save up for it’ files. The garden looks like an ideal jungle venue for an ‘I’m a Celebrity – Get me out of here!’

If the girls are at school I get up at 7 and then, unless some external opportunity to notice my existence is on my calendar (it usually isn’t) I doss on the sofa for most of the rest of the day with the television on while I gaze at it, all the while telling myself that at any minute now I shall get moving and do some housework. And/or fantasising about the books and articles I’m going to write, the ways I shall use my recovery as a vehicle to inspire others in my position and the numerous other ways my creative energies will infuse the world with positive value ‘one day’. That’s on the middling days. On the bad days I pace from one end of the house to the other, thinking about suicide and about what a mortal sin it is and how in any case, sin or not, I can’t do it because of the impact it would have on my kids.

My aging mother has phoned me almost daily all these years “Learn to be a good housewife, THEN you can think about going back to work” has been her consistent instruction. Odd how I knock my mother in her absence and even occasionally to her face, consciously separate myself from her values yet find myself curiously unable either to meet her requirements for approval or to ignore them. The curiously masochistic outcome has been that I leave my house in a state of dust, chaos and clutter that overwhelms and distresses me, whilst being paralysed by guilt from doing anything else instead that I’d prefer.

Finally I decided that if I’m ever to work and earn again – key bench marks of recovery in my mind - then I’d better turn the thing on its head: get a job first and then see if regular human interaction and externally structured purposes increase my self-esteem, pride and motivation for creating a more civilised domestic environment.

I phoned the Jobcentre. They directed me to contact Remploy as specifically contracted to assist people like myself back into work. I did so.

My first appointment was poignant. I was still suffering quite badly from depression, getting through the door was my main achievement. We spent an hour filling in on-screen forms of various kinds of information and set a date for the next appointment. In the interim I attended a Suresearch meeting and that stimulation woke me up, as did, perhaps, the anti-depressants I was taking by then. My spirits began to lift as did my expectations of the kinds of work I might be looking for.

The next major initiative from Remploy was to place me on one of their in-house work-readiness courses. I duly attended. The experience reinforced my suspicion that once ‘out and about’ mixing with others I would begin to lift and notice that my primary problems were to do with isolation – during the week I noticed my social skills and confidence were good, as was my facility to assist others who needed support and encouragement. By this time I was already becoming proactive in looking out for any vacancies that might use my abilities and experience.

Remploy, on the other hand, were more inclined to want me to limit my sights to something in the line of ‘a little shop job’ for example, and to counsel me to avoid looking at work involving responsibility of any significant kind. To my shame I temporarily allowed this advice to flatten my spirits and fill my mind with pictures of a meaningless and drab future of erased potential.

Once again a Suresearch meeting came to the rescue. By this time I’d recovered enough to begin to make contact with other friends so the decline was brief. I began to write down ideas for possible ways forward, and to list my strengths and passions in order to create a kind of profile for the ideal working situation in relation to which I could then survey practical possibilities.

I contacted Remploy more recently in relation to support and advice for self-employment avenues and they have put me in touch with an inspiring woman who is contracted by Business-Link for exactly this purpose. I haven’t made much progress so far but its early days.

I have since had a call from the local Remploy office offering the exciting news that there was a job, 39 hours a week in a factory at minimum wage that I could apply for. This alerts me to the company’s priorities and the kind of pressure people will be under once they are identified as meeting the targets of the government’s political strategy to reduce numbers receiving incapacity benefit.

I fear that this economic and statistical pressure is already giving the lie to the admirable political rhetoric that forms the official language of the initiative. I found that, apart from the confidence raising lift I got from the week’s ‘job readiness’ course and the contact I made through them with Business Link, Remploy’s focus has been fairly solidly to encourage me at all times to lower my sights and lower them some more, to throw CV’s and ‘spec letters’ to pretty well anyone and everyone in the hope of any job at all at any number of hours and with no prospects of any envisagable kind. I have the strong impression that the goal of the organisation is to hit targets of removing their clients from the benefits register as quickly as possible regardless of appropriacy or advisability.

This is a problem that needs investigating. What could potentially revolutionise the lives of those with long term unemployment problems issuing from enduring mental (and other) health issues, such as myself, and bring new hope and quality of life for many threatens to turn into yet another stick to beat us with.

The many ways that I was treated and then excluded from ‘community’ from my first hypo-manic episode onwards rapidly accumulated to create the greater part of my health problems:

• The hospital treatment in itself, between 1997 and 2000 was brutal and traumatising, and I was subjected, there, to attitudes and behaviours that were frankly destructive of any trust I could have in the services.
• My (ex) husband’s reaction from the first was alienated and angry, his behaviour began as chilly tolerance and within a year became visible contempt; treating me as an incompetent servant in front of our children. He pursued other relationships quite openly, starting before I was hospitalised for the first time, and in November 2000 he left me and our two children, then eight and ten.
• Those who I had taken to be friends of a kind stopped calling; some who I had thought were life long close friends also disappeared.
• I have on more than one occasion suffered unprovoked and unexpected insults and verbal attacks from neighbours, (once in the presence of my youngest daughter, who was thirteen at the time) some of whom took to crossing the road rather than saying hello.
• On my first return to work in 1997 my colleagues were wary and distant but formally polite. After my return to work following a relapse 15 months later the attitude had changed entirely. Colleagues actively ostracised me and I was left in no doubt that I was no longer welcome. In addition it was abundantly clear that ‘somehow’ word had got to some pupils that my absence had been due to mental health problems.
• Early in 2000 I was placed in a position where, if I did not agree to resign from my post on the grounds of ill-health I was told steps would be taken to dismiss me from my post on the grounds of my ill-health rendering me unfit for my work. Since I had not done anything at work to leave me vulnerable to any formal discipline procedure this stays in my mind as fully remarkable. The pressure was such that I resigned and accepted the small pension I was offered.

Since being out of work I have been caught between two stools. On the one hand I have not been in a well enough state to take up work due to depression and resilience in the face of the health issues and the impact of the social stigmas I have experienced.

On the other hand I have received a substantial amount of unpleasant ‘feedback’ from others, especially my ex husband and his partner relating to my ‘failure’ to be in work. I have sat and endured two hour long phone calls of character assassination and have recently received a three page letter of ‘character critique’ all insinuating that I am – and most recently explicitly stating that I am – ‘a financial and emotional burden to others’ who deliberately and persistently avoids responsibility.

This is the part that strikes me as the ultimate irony. Had I not been rejected from the work place in the first place, had I suffered from a more ‘respectable’ and ‘acceptable’ illness to start with and received social support and warmth rather than fear and contempt then perhaps I would not have spiralled into the frankly nightmarish hole of isolation and despair and poverty that has been much of my existence over the last eleven years!

Ten years on, my project of achieving anything approaching full social inclusion is something akin to escaping from quick sand. That quick sand is no longer the forces outside of me pulling me down, pushing me away, insulting me, downgrading me and drowning me but the forces within me of internalised rejection and shame and humiliation and insult. I don’t even include myself in the human race very often.

Sometimes I leave the house and arrive at a place where I am welcomed and invited wordlessly to bring up something of the healthy and positive and creative dimensions of my being – it is as a rainbow on an otherwise overcast universe of weather blowing me into the hell of an existence best summarised in the phrase ‘surplus to requirements’. Suicide is tragically common among those with my diagnosis. Not to be wondered at really.



Postscript September 9th, 2008
On 26th August I took this essay to a Suresearch meeting to submit it for possible publication. On my return I received a call from Pertemps offering me an interview for a part-time job at the Law Society to work in their Postroom in the mornings.

The interview was informal, went very well and I was led to believe that the job could become permanent in time, although it would have to be advertised publicly first. I took the job enthusiastically. I went straight home, contacted the Benefits agency and cancelled my incapacity benefit. I began work the following morning at 8am. That was Thursday 28th August.

For two days all went well, if slightly oddly. The other part-timer, a man about my age, was helpful and encouraging. The full-time worker (a young woman in her early twenties) was inclined to approach me looking dissatisfied, asking me ‘did he tell you to do that?’ She would then look disapproving and either leave me to it or tell me to do something else. It was a bit uncomfortable.

The following Monday I discovered that the part-timer was now on holiday for a week and the second full-time worker had returned, he also in his early twenties. A new culture settled in which I was made to feel uncomfortable and wrong to ask questions, was offered no warmth or encouragement whatsoever and worked continuously on the outside whilst inside myself fighting increasing feelings of discomfort that I was unwelcome and unwanted and definitely 20 years surplus to requirements. I was arriving early and getting through some basic work preparations before they arrived and I was leaving ten minutes after I was paid but nothing positive seemed to be noticed by my colleagues.

By Thursday I was telling myself not to be paranoid, trying to persuade myself that what I was feeling wasn’t really happening. I.e. I was asking myself to ignore the evidence of my senses.

On Friday afternoon, a couple of hours after I left work, I received a call from Pertemps. My colleagues had reported to their line manager that I was slow to learn and had needed to ask questions about tasks I had already been shown how to do. Therefore, she explained, they didn’t want me back.

So: my bold leap out of protected status had landed me in unprotected and penniless status within a week. More to the point, it knocked me sideways. I entered an intense struggle to fight the invite to internalise accusations of incompetence and worthlessness. Fortunately for me I’ve received strong support from others who have been able to help me refuse the negative projections of my brief colleagues.

Meanwhile I’ve lost incapacity benefit and my financial situation is uncertain to put it mildly.

Let this be a warning to anyone out there who may, like me, yearn to leap free of the indignity of state dependency too impulsively. Take one step at a time. I have to confess I was severally cautioned against my impulsive action in this case and ignored all counsel. From now on, assuming I can sort out my situation without finding myself and my daughters starving in a cardboard box... I intend to plan wisely and cautiously and take one step at a time toward my goals of financial independence and creative and social achievement.

As for Remploy, I will report their response to my current dilemma.

Indeed, I am starting to think of creating a website for reporting and sharing experiences of recovery goals including goals of financial independence.

Many well meaning (employed and/or married) individuals have advised me to relax about my state dependent status. I appreciate their warmth and kindness. The harsh reality for some people, myself included, is this, however: having a mortgage and older children to provide for on the income of state dependent status is a financial nightmare as well as a social vacuum. Somehow or another I have to find substantial sums of money to pay off my ex-husband within the next few years; if I don’t get back on my feet financially I will lose my home AND be ineligible for council housing until my equity has been thrown away on rent. I don’t want that to happen any more than I want to sit in my house on my own 24:7 wondering why I’m still here.

There is a case for rage in the face of shifting political agenda’s as they impact on social groups. When I was forcibly pensioned out of teaching eight years ago I was invited, urged, to accept that I would not work again. I found myself in a culture of ‘illness’, ‘symptoms’, ‘early warning signs’, ‘client compliance,’ and, frankly, thought policing. It was not unlike being held under house arrest for ‘thought crime’ for a few years. I’m not for one moment suggesting that I was not ill – I most certainly had tripped into a severe era of bi-polar disorder and I did need help to accept my diagnosis and to come to terms with it and with the life style changes I would need to make to gain mastery over my vulnerability. What I got for the first five years, however, was help to lose the will to live.

Now suddenly I, and those like me, are supposed to smile brightly, apologise for sapping the nation’s resources and throw ourselves into the mouths of the latest vote preparation lions. Calvinistic idiots like me, apparently, lurch forward before being called…

Janie Greville
9/9/08