Orygen, The National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health supports the McClure Report released this week calling for a new model of vocational intervention to assist young Australians with mental ill-health.
The report titled ‘A New System for Better Employment and Social Outcomes’ provides a comprehensive analysis and set of recommendations on the simplification of Australia’s welfare system.
The report makes special mention of the need to rethink how to better assist and support young people with mental illness to reach better employment and educational outcomes using targeted interventions, and endorses the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) model of employment support for people with severe and persistent mental health conditions.
‘Orygen welcomes the positive focus in the McClure report on providing expert vocational assistance for young people with mental ill-health, the fastest growing contributor to the Disability Support Pension (DSP)’ says Professor Patrick McGorry AO, Executive Director of Orygen.
‘New models of intervention to replace the costly and ineffective current approach are available for national roll out. For some young people, mental ill-heath may be episodic or persistent which threatens their vocational trajectory and leaves them severely economically disadvantaged. We need to stem the flow of young people with mental ill-health to the economic scrapheap and the DSP. They are seeking a productive and fulfilling life, a simple and achievable goal for most if we reform the system.’
Professor Eoin Killackey, author of ‘Tell Them They’re Dreaming: Work, Education and Young People with Mental Illness in Australia', says: ‘The current employment system fails young people with mental illness resulting in people with mental illness making up the largest disability group accessing the DSP.’
‘As Minister Morrison noted at the release of the report, the DSP for a young person condemns young people with mental illness to a life of economic and social marginalisation in which there is little chance of them achieving their employment or career ambitions.’
Only one-third of people with severe mental illness finish school, despite this, the top goals of young people with mental illness are to complete their education or training and to secure employment.
‘Young people with mental ill-health want to complete their education and training and re-enter the workforce and the IPS model advocated in the McClure report is the most evidenced-based method of ensuring that this happens,’ said Professor Killackey.
'Research conducted at Orygen has shown that high fidelity IPS can get in excess of 85 percent of young people with severe mental illness back to work, education and training, and by making it available more widely to young people with mental health issues would make a significant contribution towards helping people not need to access the Disability Support Pension’, he said.
Orygen are world leaders in the research and service delivery of the IPS model.
Further information:
- Young People with mental illness hold completing education/or transitioning to the workforce as their number one goals
- Current employment supports for young people with mental illness fail to help them achieve these goals
- Current employment supports for young people with mental illness are very expensive despite poor outcomes
- Individual Placement and Support (IPS) is evidence based and has fidelity measures
- Outcomes with IPS are closely associated with fidelity