Supported Employment: Training Frontline Staff - SAMHSA Store ...

Working effectively
with consumers
The overall aim of SE is to facilitate recovery. The
idea of recovery may be new to you if you came of
age professionally in an earlier era when the mental
health field generally held low expectations for
people with serious mental illnesses.
In the recovery framework, the expectation is that
consumers can live a life in which mental illness
is not the driving factor for their lives. Recovery
means more than expecting people to simply cope
with mental illness or maintaining people with
mental illnesses in the community.
In a recovery framework,
employment specialists follow
• Promote hope
• Support consumers in their efforts to take
personal responsibility for health and life
choices
• Help consumers get on with life beyond
illness
The following approaches and related interpersonal
skills will help you follow these recovery principles
and work effectively with consumers.
Promote hope
You can enhance hopefulness in these ways:
• Voicing positive statements; and
• Expressing empathy.
Voice positive statements
Having gone through a lot, consumers sometimes
lose track of their strengths. As part of developing a
working relationship with consumers, you can build
rapport by making positive statements. Positive
comments about consumers can address these
characteristics:
• Motivation for work;
• Past efforts to find work;
• Prior job experiences;
• Social skills; or
• Any other attribute worthy of praise.
Expressing heartfelt positive statements to
consumers may remind them of their strengths.
The positive tone set by these comments early
in the relationship can contribute to a sense of
optimism and good will that helps the process of
job search and maintenance.
Many people have a natural tendency to focus
more on their negative qualities than their positive
qualities. This tendency can be even greater
in people with serious mental illnesses, due to
personal setbacks they may have experienced and
negative emotions such as anxiety and depression.
For example, when describing their work history,
consumers may tend to focus more on their job
failures and difficulties holding down a job than
on personal successes. For another example, when
describing how things are going at a current job,
consumers may focus more on problems they are
experiencing than areas in which they are successful.
Focusing only on the negatives and ignoring the
positives can result in consumers’ being discouraged
and pre-occupied by their sense of “failure.” By
pointing out positive examples of personal strengths
and job success, you can counter the natural
tendency to focus only on the negative.
Pointing out positives can help consumers by
creating a more balanced picture of the consumer,
which can neutralize, or even make positive,
consumers’ overall impression of the situation.
Pointing out positives can also help consumers
become more aware of their personal strengths,
which can be capitalized on to maximize job
performance and functioning at work.
Training Job Supports Frontline and Collaborations Staff 9 Module 4