ABSTRACT
It has been many years since we had to begin nearly every discussion of vocational rehabilitation with assurances that persons who were mentally ill could still be productive at work. There was then a tacit assumption, unfortunately still adhered to in many quarters, that someone who becomes “mentally ill” has left the world of real work and is unlikely, except under unusual circumstances, to return to open competitive employment. In the early 1950s, the vocational rehabilitation field, having struggled through demonstrating that persons who suffered heart attacks and survived did not require extended bed rest (the treatment of choice at the time) and could return to the strains of daily employment very quickly, turned its attention to the rehabilitation of persons discharged from mental hospitals. There was not, of course, the advantage that there had been with heart disease of having a president of the United States (Dwight Eisenhower) demonstrate rapid rehabilitation after his illness. Even today there would still be grave question about such a demonstration with mental illness.
