Adecco Group launches new initiative to bring atypical talent into the workplace

The Adecco Foundation has organized the Week of Mental Health and Employment on the occasion of World Mental Health Day (October 10th) with the aim of helping people with mental health issues find work and de-stigmatize their situation.

Within its #EmpleoParaTodos program, Adecco has developed an objective to help participants with impairment caused by mental illness to find a job, providing them with tools and resources to end the labor stigma that often leads to even further disability.

The psychologist Juan Fernandez Blanco, specialist in mental illnesses and speaker of the first workshop of the week affirms: “People with illness face myths and biases that we must fight. The first is that people who have a serious mental disorder are violent, dangerous, aggressive. Second, that they are people that you don't know what they're capable of, at any time - unpredictable people. And third is that when someone suffers a serious mental disorder psychotic type, that person is wrong 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We must understand that the symptoms of a disease are not a state through which the person exemplifies, but rather only a trait that defines it. From these misconceptions, the conclusion is that the mentally ill cannot work or live normally.” 

For this reason, the week will feature not only with workshops focused on the employability of those suffering from mental health problems, but also with a day of specific dialogue for companies, in which they will contend with all the biases that surround these conditions address the most significant aspects of mental illness. 

Along this line, Fernández Blanco points out: “Resources are needed to compensate for the disadvantage from which people with mental illnesses start: give them accommodations, offer them flexibility, and guide them to seek out a job that fits their circumstances.”

Francisco Mesonero, General Director of the Adecco Foundation, affirms the same. 

“It is necessary that from the institutions and the business sector we become aware of the greater risk of exclusion faced by people with mental disabilities and normalize their presence in an ordinary company," Mesonero asserted. "Through the #EmpleoParaTodos project, which includes this week, we work both in raising awareness of companies and creating standardized environments, as well as candidates - supporting and guiding them to achieve their inclusion through employment.”

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