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https://twitter.com/Rethink_/status/479627218763911168

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RethinkMentalIllness @Rethink_ · Jun 19

Why we?re challenging Sunday Times piece giving advice on how to weed out job candidates w/ ?abnormal? personalities

https://www.rethink.org/news-views/2014 ... sonalities

Horrifying article from a Prof at UCL London.


News & Views
19 June 2014
Why we?re challenging Sunday Times article featuring advice on how to weed out job candidates with ?abnormal? personalities
Rethink Mental Illness Media Team

Earlier this week, one of our activists got in touch with us to flag up an extremely worrying Sunday Times article about how employers should weed out potential new employees with a ?dark-side? or ?abnormal? personality traits. The newspaper headline alone (the online version has a different one) had us worried: ?I?m sorry, he?s not a differently gifted worker ? he?s a psycho? but when we read the rest of it, we realised the headline was the least of our worries.

The piece is by Adrian Furnham, who astonishingly, is a Professor of Psychology at UCL and gives advice on how to ?spot these people at selection so you can reject them.? We were gobsmacked.

Furnham is extremely vague about what kind of people he?s talking about, and doesn?t explicitly refer to people with a mental illness. Instead he talks about the ?maladaptive personality? and goes on to describe a range of ?traits? that these people have. However, many of those traits such as anxiety, depression, guilt and hallucinations are symptoms of mental illness.

It's kind of sad, but as much as I'd like to, I can't tweet things like that because my peers don't know I have Autism.

Here's a link to the original article:

Sunday Times

From the article:

All of a sudden, I'm glad I don't have a Twitter (under my name)

Anybody who discriminates isn't good, but to play devil's advocate, don't potential employees have reasons for rejection that may go beyond someone's diagnosis?

It's sad the way the article specifies rejecting "non-team-players" as bad workers, as if the only way to be successful at a job is to work as a group. It's been scientifically proven that group ideas are frequently less successful and less imaginative than ideas reached by individuals (look at the book Quiet by Susan Cain if you want to know more).

The more I think about this article the more it disgusts me. If it was discussing how to spot physical ailments of those applying so as to reject them, the outcry would be far greater.

The cavalier manner in which he talks about excluding people with mental illnes, as if we couldn't possibly have anything to contribute, is discriminatory. It makes me so angry when people assume that if you don't thrive in group situations, then you have no value to the community.

I agree wholeheartedly with you! It is especially aggravating to me given I am redundant as of Thursday and my way of being is the main reason they are getting shut of me. Lots of managers like creativity, but cannot cope with somebody who isn't a 'team player' - but how often do they go hand in hand?

I've worked in academia for the last six years and the majority of the teaching staff I have encountered fall very clearly into the categories described by the author. His university encourages people with autism to apply and pay £9000 per year for a degree but one it's senior staff then recommends that a high proportion of them should be discarded when job applications after graduating come along! Hypocrites.

The workplace is becoming more and more unregulated, and the article advocates a workforce of drones who lack any form of difference. I'm sure that will end well!

It is an ignorant piece of drivel, but potentially is perceived as having legitimacy as it has a Prof. Title and UCL's name on it. Scary times ladies and gentlemen.

The days of going to university for the joy of education are long gone or you are wealthy. You go to university to get a qualification to get a better job, that is the way of it now. Every course has to demonstrate its contribution to employability or it simply isn't validated. It is irrelevant to the article I have drawn attention to, but advocating that people run up approx £30,000 in debts is fine as long as they don't aspire to a job that earns a pittance. Forgive me if I don't see anything positive in that. Given the average politician is completely untrustworthy, and the current system they imposed has resulted in LESS income being generated, then don't be surprised to find the threshold being lowered very shortly after the next election. It is unsustainable as it is and it is clearly duplicitous to encourage people into education when at the same time supporting research that states that anybody with a slightly different mind set shouldn't be employed at all.

I'm not entirely sure why you felt the need to leap to the university's defence, given it was the article the thread was about. I'm not interested in any further debate on Higher Education in the UK, rather that this type of 'research' threatens to do real harm. The TUC state that their research shows that only 15% of people on the ASD Spectrum hold down full time employment and discriminatory rubbish like this article only serves to exacerbate the problem.

It's already hard enough to get and keep a job as it is. Then this .. I guess they want to force all non neurotypicals to be jobless and on the streets.