Employment and people with mental illnesses

I am a proponent of employment as a healthcare solution for the mentally ill for many reasons.

It isn't just about more money or reducing disability. It isn't just about life purpose and how this may reduce the suicide rate. It isn't just about giving people skills and social contact and self esteem. It isn't just about the positive mental and physical health benefits associated with job satisfaction.

It is also about healing the Great Confinement. The creation of the asylum system hid madness - the symptoms as well as the people. Herein lies a huge sociological problem which may take as many generations to fix as it took to cause.

One immediate solution is to get the mentally ill back to work enmasse. Of course this isn't going to happen but it needs to. This forces the exposure for those who are willing to expose themselves to the stigma and prejudice and discrimination they'll face, the exposure which applied social contact theory demands of those fools willing to be fools...or crazy.

Those pioneers of change will find it hard to fit in and be valued. They will suffer and their mental health will be in peril in inappropriate environments but they will lead the way and break down the barriers for others. The explore the new frontier and pave the way for the future.

In my opinion their value is greater than sacrificing their restful existence on benefits for some greater good. It is not purely to rectify the Great Confinement which is why the mentally ill need to work. It is because the loss to society caused by the suppression of human difference has gone on too long. It is the loss to society as a whole if the mentally ill, their value and characteristics are subjugated by the compassion of psychiatry.

Civilisation is always evolving and the new age is an ideas age. It is an age where compassion is as valuable as gold, or at least I hope so and I percieve it as a trend today. New media is one industry where the value is not bricks and mortar but ideas and innvoation. Many entrepreneurs are not leaving the world with their legacy made into a monument like the Pyramids of Giza but helping the poor today, for example Bill Gates.

This evolution will not bear full fruit without all of humanity's wealth, and this wealth is our diversity. The problem is psychiatry and its role in suppressing human difference evermore with the labelling system.

Another accidental tool of suppression and exclusion is the welfare state. It too easily allowed people - types of people - to disappear from the view of the mainstream. Herein lies a problem for society in all developed world nations. The problem is larger than I can be bothered to type out now. But you get the drift...right?

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