Call to fund jobs for mentally ill

EXPERTS are warning that any mental health package in the May budget must to help mentally ill people find and keep a job.

EXPERTS are warning the Gillard government that any mental health package unveiled in the May budget will risk failure unless it includes services to help mentally ill people find and keep a job.

Following the Coalition's announcement last week of an extra $430 million to help the mentally ill find secure housing and employment, there is intense pressure on the government to implement its election promise to make mental health a second-term priority.

But some experts are concerned that government promises may focus on providing additional mental health services, such as beds and access to community-based treatment, at the expense of social problems, such as unemployment, that can exacerbate many mental conditions.

Director of psycho-social research at Melbourne's Orygen Youth Health Research Centre, Eoin Killackey, said a young person who had experienced psychosis was 10 to 20 times more likely to be unemployed; a situation that if allowed to persist would have long-term consequences for their entire life trajectory.

Yet recent studies, including some by his own team, had found that up to 85 per cent of these people could return to work or study if given the right help.

If given traditional mental health care, which focused on medical treatments for their conditions and referrals to employment services that might never be acted upon, only about 10 per cent re-entered the workforce, rising to 20 per cent among those who had finished school or attained basic qualifications.

Associate Professor Killackey said while employment services for the mentally ill already existed, they tended to have poor results because they relied on patients having the motivation not only to attend, but then to go through an assessment process lasting weeks.

"You can get lots of people jobs collecting trolleys at Coles -- but we want to think potentially about getting people into careers, rather than ticking a box so an employment service can get an outcome payment," Associate Professor Killackey said.

He said he hoped that if there were reforms in the budget, they would integrate mental health and employment services "rather than doing what we do now, which is just treating the acute symptoms and leaving people to figure the rest out for themselves".

Last week's policy announcement from the Coalition included an extra $180m to boost employment services for people with serious mental problems.

The Mental Health Council of Australia praised the policy as "comprehensive and well targeted", making this the second time in a year that the opposition has left the government in the shade on the issue.

Ian Hickie, executive director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute and one of the six experts who drew up a list of policy recommendations on which the Coalition's policy was partly based, said integrated employment services were vital.