Abstract

Mental illness represents a serious obstacle to employment. On the one hand the workers’ capability is limited by the illness itself, on the other hand the mentally ill must often face the cultural barrier of the stigma. Among active labour market policies targeted at the mentally ill, supported employment has emerged in the last decades. It is a work-oriented approach, which consists in a quick placement in the competitive labour market. Studies from the USA prove this approach to be effective in increasing the employment probability of participants, but as of today evidence of its results in Europe and in Italy is scarce. In this paper we present the experimental evaluation of an intervention based on supported employment implemented in Northern Italy, whose peculiarity is a strong focus on the use of traineeships. Our evaluation, based on a randomized controlled trial, shows that the intervention increased the chances of doing a traineeship, but had no effects on employment.