Hello everyone, my name is Christoph Gutenbrunner, I’m president of rehabilitation international and today, I’m talking at the occasion of the international day of persons with disability, which is every December, the 3rd of December, why is it important to have this day and to talk a little bit about the life situation of persons with disabilities in the year of 2025, which is 19 years after the adoption of the UN convention of the rights of people with disability by the UN General Assembly. I’m aware that we made a lot of progress since then, but we still have to face a lot of problems.
If we look at the real up situation of persons with disability, there are still a lot of limitations, for instance, for the excess to inclusive education, the access to health services is limited for a person’s disability, many people around the world who need rehabilitation do not get rehabilitation services and also the access to labour and employment. Is reduced for persons with disabilities? This year, I would like to focus on a specific group of persons experiencing disability, which are persons with mental health problems, mental health conditions.
This is a kind of invisible disability, and for that reason, it is much less focused by the international community by governments by stakeholders or the society, and the risk of discrimination is much higher than in physical disabilities, as such as limitations in mobility, we will chair, use impairments of the division, hearing impairments, and all the other things which is visible for most of the people and also understood by most of the people. But Mental conditions are not well understood and also not well visible.
And for instance, if we look at the live situation of persons with mental health conditions, we really have to see some specific problems, for instance, with regard to employment inclusion in the labour market, we know that the risk of unemployment is much higher for persons with mental health conditions, and there are statistics that show that the percentage of persons with mental health conditions in the group of unemployment people is around 50%. The prevalence of mental health conditions, of course is also very high in the general population, according to WHO statistics it is around one billion people, or even more than one billion people all around the world, which is 16%.
But in employment people, it is much higher and we also know that persons with mental health conditions have a much higher risk of poverty. The much higher risk to have a no home. So for homelessness, it is a higher risk factor and many other situations of societal exclusion and in discrimination is very high for persons with mental health conditions.
So describing this situation, it is very clear that we need to act. We need to do some activities to improve the situation, and one very important factor is the awareness and the understanding of mental health condition. What does it mean for a person?
What does it mean in terms of daily contacts of interaction of persons and many, many other things, including the vocational performance? And let me focus a little bit on the inclusion of persons with mental health conditions into the labour market into the first labour market. This is possible, but we need to think about a few main factors that are important for this situation.
On the one hand we have to think about the person’s itself himself or herself, because it’s Ingles. We need to make sure that the mental health condition is diagnosed. And treated properly and early enough, we have many deficits in this respect This is the basis, but we also need to, uh think about a few other factors.
If we talk about participation in the labour market, we need to shift our focus from symptom reduction to potential potentials and abilities of persons with mental health condition to string and persons with health conditions to be active to contribute to society, but there is more needs, for instance, with regard to the job vocational rehabilitation measures. Specially focused on mental health condition is necessary. And at the job in the workplace itself, it sometimes is necessary to have direct support to have coaching, to have some people who take care and also sort problems if they occur.
This is the focus on the person the rehabilitation focus, but also in the companies at the employment at the workplace. Some measures need to be done first is that it is important that the employee’s employers and the manus need to know about mental health condition what is necessary and how to react to this, and this non change this is awareness is also important for the colleagues for the team they also need to know what is the part of the condition and what they can do be done, but also and this is the third point, which is very important.
We need to adapt the workplace to a mental health conditions not only for wheelchair users or blind to people or deaf people also for people with mental health conditions. That means for instance to have rooms. Calm rooms to have some short breaks in between the work organisation.
For instance, the relation of the front office and back office work, and as many other things needs to be discussed, and the last point is it is still possible that a person’s mental health condition have a reduced capacity or performance, and this needs to be compensated by society by the state in the end and you can discuss about these things equally for children with mental health conditions and the inclusion into kind of garden and schools for students at the university. And in other educational institutions, even here, we need the same principle to support persons with mental health condition, and to have a inclusive environment. And for that reason, I think all of us should think about it, and we have to take action on the one hand of course this is the responsibility of decision makers, the government and politicians and many others because they need to have provided with framework, but it’s also very important that stakeholders at all level are prepared for this one.
The one hand this is important for teachers for servicemen for many, many others, but also for the general society that we need to have awareness and my message today is please think about that. Please think about persons with mental health conditions in your environment at your workplace in your families and inform yourself what does it mean and for the politicians, the decision makers and the stakeholders, please start professional programmes to enable persons with disability and persons dis mental health conditions to participate in the educational system in the work and employment and many other areas of life.
So thank you very much for listening and please think about it and make your own decision what you can do to improve the life secretion of persons with mental health condition to reduce discrimination to reduce exclusion and to work towards inclusion. Thank you very much.
This content is restricted to site members. If you are an existing user, please sign in. New users may sign up below.
