People with severe mental disorders lose an average of more than 10 years of working life: "People continue to feel an atrocious mistrust"

Esperanza Iglesias is 57 years old and is currently studying the last year of the Degree in English Studies at UNED.

In 2019 she obtained the recognition of physical and mental disability.

She is diagnosed with fibromyalgia and various degenerative diseases.

She also, since 2012, chronic major depressive disorder with unspecified personality disorder.

Until that 2019 she and since she was 15 years old she had worked almost without interruption.

"Except for some bad season," she clarifies.

When the disability resolution occurred, she Iglesias had been working for almost a decade as a public employee of the Junta de Andalucía.

“I began to suffer from cramps, very strong pain, I was unable to move because I had undiagnosed scoliosis.

I was no longer well when I started, due to very serious problems with my children and my family,

and I had already had periods of depression several times in my life, but then I did sink into depression.

I was locked up at home for almost three years, lying in bed," she told EL PAÍS.

Iglesias recalls that, when he began to have longer absences, he immediately perceived a change in his relationship with many colleagues.

“I realized that they mistrusted me.

It seemed that I had to review everything I did, look at my work with a magnifying glass, complain about insignificant errors in writing to my superiors... It was a strange feeling.

When you have a physical illness, they ask you how you are all the time, but if it's mental, they pretend that nothing is wrong, trying to ignore you, period.

That made me feel a lot of guilt and also a lot of anger,” he notes.

For her, the explanation for this change in behavior is clear: the stigma surrounding mental illness.

“People continue to feel an atrocious mistrust.

They look at us in a different way, as if they were waiting for you to do something outrageous”, she assures before recounting that for many years she pretended to be more active and cheerful than she really was during working hours: “No one wants to work with a nervous

, the assumption is that this person will be slow, sloppy, unreliable, and will dump you whenever they feel like it.

She can even be violent or aggressive.

Mental illness continues to be a drag for many people when it comes to accessing or staying in the labor market.

According to the latest INE report

, corresponding to the year 2021, only 17.7% of people diagnosed with severe mental disorder in Spain have a job.

Only intellectual disability has worse insertion figures (17.2%).

In addition, according to these same data, it is the circumstance that disability due to mental illness has the greatest gap between the actual employment of the group and the desire to work of people diagnosed with severe mental disorder, since the activity rate rises to 29%.

“Many people with mental health problems have come forward and have denounced having suffered discrimination in the workplace, which is why we have just launched the first State Observatory for Mental Health, Rights and Equality, where people can find out and tell us about their situation. , either in this workplace, or in any other in which they think their rights have been violated," says Nel González Zapico, president of the Spain Mental Health Confederation.

10 years of working life lost on average

It is indisputable evidence that mental illness impacts people's working lives.

What was not known for sure is how much.

Now, a study led by the Catalan researcher Oleguer Plana-Ripoll, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Aarhus (Denmark), and published in the journal

, has put a concrete figure for this impact: 10.5 are the years that people diagnosed with a mental disorder work less compared to the general population.

That is the average of the 24 serious mental disorders analyzed, but there are disorders such as schizophrenia that shoot up to 24 years of lost working life.

“We already knew that people with mental illnesses had a much higher risk of being unemployed or receiving disability pensions, but the truth is that the 10-year figure surprised us a bit because of its magnitude, because losing 10 years of working life is a lot, argues Plana-Ripoll.

In addition, he adds, "the fact that we have found that all serious mental illnesses are associated with lost years of working life also gives us a clue to think that less severe mental health cases will surely also have an impact on working life." of those affected, even if it is smaller”.

The researcher already participated in another previous study published in

which concluded that people with severe mental disorders have an annual income of almost 19,000 euros less than people without these disorders.

“That's the most obvious and direct impact of those lost work years,” she says.

Francisco Ballesteros Pérez, doctor in Psychology from the Complutense University of Madrid and member of Grupo 5, a company dedicated to the psychosocial rehabilitation of people in situations of social vulnerability, not only is the figure not surprising, but he believes that in the Spanish context it could be even higher.

“The average age at which people start working is around 23 or 24 years.

However, what comes to us at labor rehabilitation centers?

People with an average age of about 37 or 38 years who, moreover, as a general rule, arrive without previous work experience, with which we already have a significant gap ”, he maintains.

For the expert, the economic impact of this deficit in years worked is undeniable: "Having less access to economic resources opens the door to many social problems, from issues in access to housing, to difficulties in having an adequate diet , going through the difficulty to maintain the specific treatments”.

Ballesteros points out that this lack of employment also deteriorates the identity of people with severe mental disorders and affects their social and community integration.

“The consequences are also for families, who have to take care of themselves financially;

and for society as a whole, ultimately, because a person who works contributes to society, ”he adds.

In the same sense, Nel González Zapico pronounces himself, who recalls that people with low incomes are between 1.5 and 3 times more likely to suffer from depression or anxiety than people with high incomes;

and that there is also abundant scientific literature that relates job insecurity to the deterioration of physical and psychological health, as well as the generation of health inequalities.

“There are studies that affirm that there is an association between the unemployment situation and the presence of mental health problems”, he explains.

According to the expert, the unemployed population presents, compared to the active population, between 1.3% and 18.8% more people with mental health problems.

“All these data are especially serious in the case of women with mental health problems,

since they tend to occupy the lowest quality jobs, have fewer permanent contracts than men, their salary level is lower and they are overrepresented in part-time jobs, both voluntary and involuntary.

Many of them, moreover, are in charge of the reproductive work that sustains the homes and families”, he explains.

To turn this scenario around, the president of the Spain Mental Health Confederation calls for "urgent measures" that, in addition to ending the stigma, improve mental health care.

"In 2020 in Denmark there were 54.3 psychology professionals for every 100,000 inhabitants, while in Spain the figure did not reach 6, something that hinders the recovery of a normal life for those who have a mental health problem," he explains. he.

It also requires that both private companies and public bodies and administrations invest in resources that facilitate the employment of people with mental disorders: job training, special employment centers, reserve quotas for people with disabilities, supported employment and promotion of labor insertion in ordinary employment positions.

“We want the job reserve quotas for people with disabilities to be met, both in the public administration and in the private sector, and that this quota be increased in access to public employment up to 8% (currently it is at a maximum of 7%) for people with disabilities, with a quota reserved for people with mental disorders of 2% of the total.

But, above all, from the Confederation we continue to demand that the public administration more forcefully promote policies that favor the transition from protected employment to ordinary employment", claims González Zapico, for whom facilitating access to employment would mean jumping one of the main barriers that today prevent the social integration of people with severe mental disorders.

Esperanza Iglesias agrees with him: “Looking back, I have realized that it was precisely work that kept me busy so as not to get depressed.

When I physically couldn't take it anymore, the anguish of thinking that I might not be able to go back to work was brutal.

It took me a long time and I needed a lot of support to get through it”.

You can follow