Employ someone with a mental illness? That's not crazy

Employ someone with a mental illness? That's not crazy


As part of its recent “Channel 4 Goes Mad Season”, the TV channel carried out an extended interview process involving eight volunteers, some of whom had suffered (or continued to suffer) from severe mental illnesses and some of whom had not. During the interview process the interviewers and the audience were left in the dark as to which candidates had had mental health issues and were left to draw their own conclusions.

The programme comes at a time when there is increased focus on tackling the stigma surrounding mental health issues. From a social standpoint, when we ask ourselves whether we think it is a good thing for those with disabilities such as mental illnesses to be employed, most of us would think that it would be. However, the vast majority may think that it would be better that these individuals are employed in organisations other than their own! A “not in my back yard” attitude, so to speak. Indeed one of the interviewers in the Channel 4 programme, Claude Littner (one of Lord Sugar’s henchmen on the Apprentice), said at the beginning of the programme in relation to employing someone who felt repeatedly suicidal, “I would be sad for them and I would not employ them."

However, despite feeling this way, after several days of tests involving work related situations, Claude and the other two interviewers chose their three top candidates based on ability and all three were found to have (or have had) serious mental health conditions. We would imagine that if we were presented with someone who has had a serious condition which has lead them to be sectioned for eight months or someone who has suffered from a chronic mental health condition for 30 years, as was the case for two of the volunteers in the programme, we would be able to tell. However, interesting even the psychologists involved in the programme could not pick out all (or even the majority) of those with psychological issues. In this way, the programme did seem to break down a certain amount of barriers and the “us and them” mentality.

Having found the best candidates in the experiment to be those who have had such serious mental health conditions, how should we react to this? Interestingly, we often see, for example, perfectionism and attention to detail as positive traits, but there cannot be that much of a fine line between perfectionism and someone prone to suffer from an anxiety disorder or someone who wants to check something very thoroughly and someone who may be prone to developing obsessive compulsive disorder. Sometimes such employees who have a tendency to such mental health conditions can make great employees as the programme showed. So rather than just thinking that employing someone with mental health issues is something that is good for society but bad for business, maybe we need to think again!