COMMUNITY EXPECTATIONS AND PSYCHIATRIC REHABILITATION
LAWRENCE C. HARTLAGE 1
1 Psychologist Central State Hospital, Anchorage, Ky.
Five hundred randomly selected employers in the Greater Louisville area were mailed questionnaires concerning their attitudes toward the hiring or rehiring of individuals who had spent some time under treatment for mental illness.
One hundred twenty-seven employers returned completed questionnaires. Although almost every employer who had hired a former mental patient (roughly half of all employers who returned the questionnaire) felt that these workers compared favorably with other employees in terms of absenteeism, accidents, ability to function, reliability, and amount of supervision required, their attitudes were almost universally prejudiced against hiring other ex-mental patients.
Although over 90% of the employers returning the questionnaire felt that the patients who had been treated for psychiatric illness would be hireable, if properly trained and qualified, fewer than 16% had knowingly hired a former mental patient in the last year.
