ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, Olshansky (1958) and his colleagues in Massachusetts listed the matters perceived by employers as constituting difficulty when hiring the ex-mental patient: concern with possible violence; a low tolerance threshold of pressure and speed; ‘incompatibility’; bizarre behaviour; a need for close supervision; and, a very prominent concern, fear of a recurrence of illness or relapse. Analysis of the comments of our own occupational health doctor respondents identified very much the same matters: a tendency towards excessive sickness absence; disturbance of the work of others; difficulties of personal relationship; and again, a recurrence of illness or relapse. Episodes of extreme oddity of behaviour or of acute breakdown leading to violence, feared by the earlier employers, had however been found to affect only a small minority (Wansbrough 1974).
