mentally challenged and open employment

Mentally challenged can be rehabilitated in different ways and rehabilitation has different meaning considering the degree of retardation. There are five different categories of mentally challenged. Like border line, mild, moderate, severe and profound. Apart from this many other things are also to be considered. The five categories mentioned are based on IQ level. But along with IQ we must think about his socialization level, communication skills[ verbal or non verbal], command compliance level etc. In case of severely and profoundly retarded children, it is their social rehabilitation we talk about. In these cases, the main focus is on improving quality of life of the child. Most of these children are very poor in activities for daily leaving[ADL] or self help skills.

But remaining three types like border line, mild and moderate we have few options. one is in a sheltered workshop. Here these persons will work in a group. This group is supervised and controlled by trained personnels. All working people are mentally challenged.

In another type of rehab option, mentally challenged person will work in the factory or office or business establishment along side the normal workers. They will be given a job in which repetitive actions are required and decision making is not involved. This is called as open employment. In this situation, we need to council the employer first, he must understand the limitation of these persons. He is supposed to give work which is always of the same type and there should not be much of variation in the work procedure. He also should understand that there could be few mood swings also and we must bare it. Further, he should take full responsibility of the safety of this person. Then we have to talk to all other workers working in this establishment, these people must be told about mental disability in general and these mentally disabled children in particular. We have to tell these co-workers about the limitations of these candidates and what precaution they are supposed to take while dealing with them. If we do these preliminary things properly then we can expect success in this open employment venture.

The reason I am scribbling about this types of employment of mentally challenged is that, at Sandnya we have got this opportunity for open employment. One of our corporate donors M/s Star Circlips, MIDC, Butibori has given us a offer of employing few of our students from vocational training section. We are through from the first step, i.e. counselling employer. Since the MD and the factory managers and many of the employees of this factory are our donors, there is no problem of convincing. We had a awareness meeting in the factory itself for the workers. So the subject and problem of mentally disabled is already known to them.

I am sure, this will be successful and it will be role model for other prospective employers and other mentally challenged children in this region of Vidarbha.

By: Navin Deshpande, Secretary, SSS

website: www.sandnya.org email: navindesh@gmail.com