Plain language summary by Rosie Bogumil

This article tells us whether the mental health of young people with disabilities is affected by employment status. Employment status refers to whether someone has a job and how often they work.

Previous research has shown that young adults with disabilities are less likely to be employed. People with disability are more likely to have poor mental health than non-disabled people. The authors wanted to find out if these two things were related.

To do this, the researchers used data from a survey of Australian households. It collected data across four years between 2016 and 2019. First, researchers looked at the people aged 20-35 years. Then they compared the answers of people with a disability to those without a disability. They found that young people with disability have poorer mental health. They also found that 20% of this relationship was due to being unemployed or wanting to work more. This suggests that employment status may partly explain the poor mental health of young adults with disability.

The researchers also noted that being employed does not reflect job quality. Job quality refers to the suitability of a job and an individual’s experiences at work. Disabled people are more likely to experience poorer job quality. This is also associated with poor mental health. Future research could look at mental health and job quality for young people with disabilities.

This study shows that higher unemployment rates among young disabled people may be connected to poorer mental health. This means that improving employment opportunities could also improve mental health. The authors recommend that action is needed to improve employment rates for young people with disability. This could reduce the unequal mental health status between young people with and without disabilities.

About the author:

Rosie (she/they) is a lived experience research assistant living with mental illness. She loves the challenge of pursuing her interests in literature and health sciences concurrently and is proudly the only poet-physiotherapist that she knows of.

Citation:

Shields, M., Spittal, M. J., Aitken, Z., Dimov, S., Kavanagh, A., & King, T. L. (2023). Does employment status mediate the association between disability status and mental health among young adults? Evidence from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 80(9), 498-505. https://doi.org/10.1136/oemed-2023-108853