I wrote the other day of my annoyance at the dreadfully stigmatising headlines about mental health in the wake of the Germanwings plane crash.
It’s good to see that Nick Clegg has given quite a detailed interview reported on the Huffington Post while on the battle bus about this issue in which he said that there shouldn’t be a blanket ban of people with mental ill health doing any job. Employers had to look at people’s individual circumstances and be as accepting of people with mental ill health as with physical.
I think it’s very important that we don’t, however understandable in this context, allow what is said about one individual to shape or colour the way in which we regard people who go through episodes of mental health problems.
It’s very important that employers in all walks of life are as accepting of people who are recovering from mental health problems just as much as they would be people who recover from physical health problems.
He warned of the dangers of shutting people with mental ill health out of work:
That’s been one of the great problems, the stigma around mental health, which is because people are either frightened or embarrassed about mental health problems they tend to keep their distance from people who have had mental health problems, when it happens to so many individuals.
We certainly don’t want to see people with mental health problems deliberately or otherwise shut out of work. That would be consigning a lot of people to a cycle of despair, which would be wholly unfair and wholly unjust.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings