NHS Excluding people in treatment for mental health conditions.

[Heathe]

Going to enable voting but realise this may not do me any favours. I am currently in treatment for a mental health condition, and currently applying for roles within mental health trusts. I have previously worked during this treatment so can demonstrate I can handle treatment and working, however, many of the jobs are stating that a person has to be in recovery, has to have experience of recovery etc.

These are Lived Experience, Expert by Experience, Peer Support Roles, Support Worker roles etc.

I'm just wondering whether excluding people currently in treatment for mental health conditions is actually against the Equality Act as a mental health condition is a protected characteristic.

Apart from the fact it has made me feel completely inadequate and has really knocked my confidence, I am starting to feel really frustrated that people who are treating patients with mental health conditions are so open to excluding them in this way, particularly when many of us are in group therapy so we have experience of hearing and dealing with other people's concerns and issues.

I'm interested to hear if anyone has a legal perspective on this, or if anyone else has found this when applying for roles?

YANBU - this is shit

YABU - this is sensible

I don’t think there should be a blanket exclusion for the roles you describe, but I can also see your employers would want to know you are well enough to provide support for others, in a way that won’t also damage your own health.

It's not always wrong to exclude someone from a particular job because of a health condition. Just as some very physical jobs might require robust physical health, some mentally and emotionally demanding jobs might require robust mental health. The equality act requires that employers make reasonable adjustments, but this does not mean that all people are good candidates for all jobs.

Not while in active crisis. The purpose of therapy for those courses is for observation and reflection.

by Clinicians who publicly state that recovery is a piss poor concept that should be binned

Yeh I was thinking that.

The mental health team definition of "recovery" is usually just "not in crisis and managing the condition". It's never used with the traditional meaning of "no longer ill", because that's not usually achievable for serious mental illness.

So you do have experience of recovery because you're managing your life.

@Changeisneeded theres been a few recent ones, particularly the band 7 LXP roles though, but yes SW and PSW roles are coming out the same.

However the Equality Act doesn't require employers to take on disabled staff for a role their disability is fundamentally incompatible with.

Not sure if your response about professionals was aimed at me OP, I was referring to the professionals to whom with your applying to work not the ones treating you. All seems a bit tangled up if the professionals treating you are your referees of that’s what you mean? Really for Lund like you need to take step back and focus on recovery before potentially exposing yourself to high levels of stress in a MH role.

In this case though, the disability is also an essential qualification for the role, which complicates the issue.

@tickticksnooze

Exactly, I manage my mental health via accessing once a week individual therapy. I’m not in active crisis.

@hurdling if you’ve been out of work for the amount of time I have been the NHS actually advise you use people from your team as referees who know you personally since your last work reference.

@fairyliz unfortunately tried the admin role thing but they don’t seem to take on Oxbridge graduates with PhDs in a field related to health… so it’s really not that simple. I’ve also tried all the supermarkets, most banks, most law firms with health related aspects for admin roles / shelf stacking etc.

I just had a look at nhs jobs and found one band 7 post.

‘Lived experience of recovery from mental and emotional distress, and experience of using secondary care mental health services‘

it had this statement in but just to say that it says recovery not recovered so if you are in mental health treatment you would tick that box of yes - I couldn’t see anything about being recovered?

@Changeisneeded but if you contact them they mean “in recovery” as in not in treatment - I’m not sure which trust that is and obvs don’t want to tar all trusts with the same brush and won’t name the ones that I (and others) have been told this by. Haven’t looked for a couple of weeks so will take a look and get in contact with them

That was CNWL feels very strange as so many people in mental health access treatment for it

It is really interesting to hear everyone’s views on this though - thank you for sharing! It is very much appreciated.

I work within mental health and I also have lived experience of being an inpatient then intensive therapy. I've been in recovery for 12 years and I still had a flashback on a particular ward and my PTSD made a come back .I won't work on some wards or just very rarely bank as I find it's not good for me to work full time with that patient group. Also it's not good for the patients as counter transference can happen this is about the patients recovery not yours..

I still work within mental health but I'm based in organic and brain injury which suits me a lot better and has no connection to my personal life at all. The thing you have to learn when you go to work in mental health it's not about you or your recovery anymore it's about your patients. You need to have a strong support system and good coping skills. I wouldn't recommend if you are still in active treatment and not somewhere working with people with similar diagnosis / traumas as yourself.

@Changeisneeded oh that’s interesting. That’s new up then. I’ll take a look
and get in contact with them. Thank you.

@Fifife i absolutely agree with everything you have said - I’m not applying for every job going at all. And given who my references are this is all being looked at very closely.

im sorry about the flashback.

(Obviously I don’t agree with the active treatment bit because I’m always going to be in that, well at least for another 10 plus years and it’s part of my support system, which is wide and varied outside of it too)

I would only want to work with someone who was recovered. I think you need to be secure in your own recovery before helping others. I have experience with a damaged person given responsibility over others in a church setting who should not have been in the position they were in.

@MinervaTerrathorn but what does “recovered” mean to you?

I am sorry about what happened with the church setting (but… please don’t refer to anyone with MH conditions as damaged!)

That's fine but working within mental health is very very different to being a patient. It can be a dog eat dog world even the most "well" people can struggle with the demands. You need to make sure you have very high resilience and very good coping skills. You need to be able to identify if the work is affecting your mental health and strategies in place to mitigate that. Also you need to be able to switch off after a shift and get back to your life.

Thank you @Fifife - it’s really important for me to read this and consider again all these things.

The discrimination that needs to be in place is between therapy for crisis and ongoing psychological support. Very different things.

I'm not sure, however, that can be verified, not really. So it could be the wording for these ads is basically to avoid the intricacies of grey zones that would take time/resources to fully investigate/verify.

Saying that, when I volunteered for a listening service I had to have a chat with a psychologist whose job it was to make sure I was psychologically suitable for the role. It occurs to me now that in regular MH jobs this isn't standard? Other roles have psychometric testing to weed out interviewees based on cognitive capacity/tendencies. It's interesting that there doesn't seem to be an equivalent in MH jobs.

Not in treatment. The condition no longer affecting their day to day life such that they require treatment. Fully healed and secure in their own recovery so that the condition would not affect their interactions with the client and the work would not trigger them. Maybe not the best choice of words but this person had suffered significant trauma in their life and was not healed or stable which reflected in their interactions with others causing harm.