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The Employability of Chronic Schizophrenics

Cheadle Royal Hospital, Cheadle,Cheshire

R. F. Scott, B.A., Dip.Psych., Industrial Director and B. W. P. Wells, B.A., Research Psychologist

ABSTRACT

An inspection of the final column of comparative costings in Tables I and II indicates that the owner of the outside factory would definitely find his 10 operators employable. The deficit for the sheltered factory, employing 30 patients, amounts to £1,070 per year but this figure includes the salaries of two charge nurses (£1,500) who would have to be employed irrespective of whether the patients were working, thus converting this deficit into a small profit.

Further, mental patients are now entitled, as the physically disabled are, to be registered as disabled persons. Facilities have now been created whereby suitable mental patients who can perform roughly a third the amount of work of normal workers over a normal working week, can be approved by the Ministry of Labour and Local Authority and then be paid an industrial wage (i.e. £8 5s. Od. for men and :6 3s. 9d. for women). Thus it becomes possible to provide permanent sheltered realistic work for the mentally disabled. With these terms of reference therefore, one can say that long-stay mental patients are employable at no cost to the hospital. What is equally important, however, is that such a unit offers opportunities of complete rehabilitation with placement of a certain percentage of these patients in outside employment. What is also important is that such a unit provides excellent facilities both for assessing patients' abilities based on their actual work performance, and of providing learning situations in which patients may increase their abilities and reduce their disabilities or attitudes towards them. The problem is less to train the long-stay mental patient in a particular craft or skill than to develop the correct habits and attitudes necessary if resumption either of former types of occupation or training for new skills is to be accomplished. Finally, the success of the unit can to some extent be judged by the fact that in the last 12 months, 18 long stay patients have been successfully placed in various types of outside employment quite unrelated to the work carried out in the hospital factory.