The Effects of Vocational Rehabilitation for People with Mental Illness

The public-sector Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) program is a $3 billion federalstate partnership designed to provide employment-related assistance to persons with disabilities. While thought to play an important role in helping persons with disabilities to engage in gainful employment (Loprest, 2007), very little is known about the long term-effi cacy of VR in the United States. With one very recent exception (Cimera, 2010), the last published evaluation of the U.S. public-sector VR program is from over 20 years ago (Dean and Dolan,1991).1 Although certainly informative, the earlier studies have a number of methodological shortcomings and have only limited relevance to the current VR system which serves a clientele with a much wider range of impairments. Originally established in 1919 to provide restorative services to persons with primarily physical disabilities, the program’s emphasis has shifted in recent decades to serve persons with cognitive impairments or mental illness. While comprising an ever-larger share of the VR clientele, the latter group has turned out to be particularly hard to serve. As the Government Accountability Offi ce (2005)