Calay News
Esperanza Iglesias, a 57-year-old woman in her final year of an English Studies degree at UNED, was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, several degenerative diseases, chronic major depression with an unspecified personality disorder, and undiagnosed scoliosis. In 2019, Esperanza received official recognition of her physical and mental disability.
Since the age of 15, Esperanza has worked almost without interruption, except for a few bad seasons. Until 2019, she had worked for almost a decade as a public employee of the Junta de Andalucía. However, when she started taking longer leaves due to her health problems, she began to notice a change in her relationship with her colleagues. She felt that they distrusted her, checking everything she did and complaining about insignificant mistakes in her writing to her superiors. Esperanza felt very bad about all this, guilty and even angry.
Many people still face barriers to entering or remaining in the labor force due to mental illness. According to the latest INE report on the employment of people with disabilities in Spain, only 17.7% of people diagnosed with severe mental disorders are employed, with intellectual disability having the worst insertion figures (17.2%). In addition, disability due to mental illness has the biggest gap between the actual employment of the group and the desire to work of people diagnosed with severe mental disorders, since the activity rate amounts to 29%.
Catalan researcher Oleguer Plana-Ripoll, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Aarhus (Denmark), has led a study published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry that reveals that people diagnosed with a mental disorder work on average 10.5 years less than the general population. In the 24 severe mental disorders analyzed, there are cases such as schizophrenia that account for 24 years of lost working life. In addition, people with severe mental disorders have an annual income of almost 19,000 euros less than people without these disorders. These data show that mental illnesses have a significant impact on people’s working lives and that the problem needs to be addressed to promote the inclusion of people with severe mental disorders in the labor market.
