Sadly, mental health services are accused of focusing too much on symptom reduction, and too little on helping people regain employment (Secker, 2001). Traditional models of work rehabilitation emphasise lengthy training before work placement. This delay may exacerbate feelings of social exclusion (Waghorn et al., 2009). A more modern approach, supportive employment, rapidly places individuals into work while providing support and training alongside. The most successful iteration of supportive employment is ‘Individual Placement and Support’ (IPS). IPS places competitive employment as the primary goal by integrating vocational and clinical services towards this end. IPS is at its most successful when fidelity to its principles are high (Drake et al., 2012).
IPS is now seen as the ‘gold standard’, but only in the USA. There has been doubt as to whether IPS can generalise to other countries, given variation in economic growth, availability of employment, and health services (Boardman & Rinaldi, 2013). Published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, a recent study examined whether IPS is effective in different countries by carrying out a meta-analysis of available international studies (Modini et al., 2016).