Chris Ruane – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Chris Ruane on 2014-06-04.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the proportion of people who are currently unemployed who have repeat episode depressions; and what discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Health on the use of mindfulness-based interventions in making people ready for work.

Mike Penning

We do not keep health data on those who are currently unemployed. However we know that at any one time one in six people has a mental health problem like anxiety or depression, and a further two in a hundred are affected by severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia.

We are currently considering the design of the pilots to test the most promising interventions and evidence-based approaches put forward by RAND Europe and we will be implementing these pilots this year.