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Focus

Youth work

Preparing young people for a promising future

By Astrid Van Den Broek

Searching for your first job is not one of life’s easier tasks. Being young and struggling with mental health issues complicates this milestone task that much more. Perhaps your client left school early, so she struggles with literacy and socializating in institutional settings. Perhaps the basic etiquette that students learn in school – being punctual, clean and well-presented, calling in if you’re going to miss a day – are foreign concepts to her. Perhaps she has to work extra hard to get up in the morning because of the side-effects of medication.

It is during youth that individuals often transition into roles they maintain long into the future. This transition can involve completing school, securing full-time employment and becoming financially independent. But to successfully accomplish these, youth must develop good interpersonal skills, sound judgment and a sense of personal responsibility and purpose, in addition to academic and work skills. Mental illness in youth presents the double difficulty of looking for work with a mental illness and lacking skills due to interrupted education.

Supporting these youth in finding work is important in order to veer them off a path of poverty and dejection. Unfortunately, it can be a common path, given that about 20 per cent of youth aged 4 to 16 experience a mental health issue, according to the Canadian Psychiatric Association.

Despite the high need among youth with mental health issues, most youth employment programs are not prepared to address the specific needs of these youth. “We need much more support for young people with mental health concerns getting into employment,” says Tarina Dueck, manager of disability services at Prospect, a non-profit organization in Calgary, Alberta, that connects underrepresented populations, such as youth with mental illness, to their communities, be it through employment, recreational support or other means. Prospect is one of the few programs in Canada that targets the employment needs of youth through a supported employment model.

At Prospect, as with other agencies that provide supported employment, the focus is on fast job placement. “Our goal is to assist individuals in getting into an employment setting as quickly as possible so they can gain the skills and have the experience as it relates to what they’ll actually be doing,” says Dueck. That could mean that Prospect staff act as job coaches and sometimes accompany clients to work.

“Because it’s been a difficult process or they’ve been out of work for a while, our young clients seem to have a greater appreciation and loyalty towards being in a job. It’s really their goal to work and have paid employment.”

These individualized programs also help young people prepare for job searching and interviews and provide ongoing support once they find work. They also involve teaching “softer” skills like advocating for yourself, communicating with co-workers and accepting feedback from a boss. Clients also get individualized counselling around issues like proper social etiquette and whether and how to disclose their illness to an employer.

Gastown Vocational Services, a vocational and educational service for young people aged 16 to 30 in Vancouver, British Columbia, also prepares young people for work. “We have two streams of people coming to see us. With the younger ones, it’s often to get their first work experience,” says Colleen McCain, an occupational therapist and team leader for the youth employment and educational program. “Because of their illness, they may have been delayed in school and haven’t gotten the life experiences to know how to get a job. The other stream is more for career exploration, where we do vocational assessments and find out about clients’ skills, abilities and aptitudes.” Clients use the service anywhere from six months to a few years.

That flexibility in program offering is something Susan Miner knows about. Miner, the director of street outreach services for LOFT Community Services in Toronto, which works with youth under 25 involved in or at risk of being involved in prostitution, began incorporating individualized job training as part of LOFT’s overall program when she noticed that clients were ill-prepared for job searching and job placement, which proved to be one of their biggest barriers to changing their lives.

“We have to be consistent and available, so young people may pop into the program on day one to see a counsellor and have an assessment, and then return for five days in a row, or we may not see them again for three months,” says Miner. “There’s no time limit. There isn’t the expectation that you have to do this by such and such a time.” While she does instill clients with high expectations to succeed, time itself isn’t an issue.

Studies show that the expectation to succeed isn’t an unrealistic one. A study published in a 2008 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry found that in a six-month period, young people aged 15 to 24 who had experienced first-episode psychosis and who received supportive employment were able to get and keep jobs. The study also found that supported employment participants worked more hours than participants who did not receive supported employment. They also earned more income in a wider variety of positions and lowered their reliance on social assistance benefits by 25 per cent.

Expecting youth with mental illness to stay on the job isn’t unrealistic either. “Because it’s been a difficult process or they’ve been out of work for a while, they seem to have a greater appreciation and loyalty towards being in a job,” says McCain at Gastown. “It’s really their goal to work and have paid employment.”

It is insights like these that set apart supportive employment initiatives from standard employment programs for youth. There is a real practical component as well to helping youth on the road to employment. “One thing that matters to most youth here is having a fairly regular schedule,” says Judi Clooney, a community support staff member at Laing House in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a support centre for young adults living with mental illness. “They often don’t like to work varying shift work. They’d prefer to work the same shifts each day. Because of medication and sleep schedules, they’d like to maintain a regular work schedule.”

Another common concern is around disclosing mental illness to employers or potential employers. “Many of our youth will debate whether to tell their employer because they fear discrimination,” says Judy Bell, Laing’s director of programming.

McCain agrees: “Sometimes people get worried – what if someone finds out?” she says. The additional stress that comes with that worry can hinder clients’ attempts to feel comfortable in their positions and focus on work. “For some people, we’re a safety net. We can be involved in the disclosure and can help educate the employer and let them know they can come to us if they have any questions.” Ultimately, the choice to disclose or not is the client’s.

When it comes to the employer, some youth agencies work hands-on, front and centre with employers, while others stay more behind the scenes. Prospect has employment placement specialists in the community looking for job opportunities for its clients. They also talk to potential employers about the importance of having a diverse workforce that includes employees with mental illness. These professionals sometimes work with employers more directly on on-the-job training. “We help them figure out how to train someone who might learn differently, or structure a role so that it makes sense to someone with a different learning style,” says Dueck. The specialists also help employers break down job tasks into more manageable components for employees and provide them with strategies for working more effectively with a broad range of individuals.

Just as accommodations may vary, so do client definitions of success. “We have had young people who are ecstatic to have jobs at coffee shops, which is terrific,” says Miner at LOFT. “We’ve seen other youth go on to university, graduate and find different types of jobs. For each of them, that success is equal. Some people love to talk about one of our young people who is now a lawyer, but I love that one of my young people held a job for a year at a donut shop. I’m not sure I could have. It’s very individual.”

While supported employment paves a promising road to workplace success, more such programs are badly needed. “We have a wait list of six to eight months,” says McCain. “We have 32 clients and my wait list is 37 people. Because we follow through that whole process to give young people the best service, there’s not a high turnover. We need more resources and more people for programs like these.”