Help from Help Wanted

MEN--WOMEN. Factory positions open for those who have experienced mental or emotional illness. Good starting salary. No experience necessary. Scientific evaluations to assist in proper placement.

Within 5 1/2 hours after the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune hit the stands with this unusual classified ad, it drew 31 replies. Many a former mental patient clipped the ad and answered it later, and there was a total of no replies. Industrial Psychiatrist W. Ray Poindexter Jr. found, after a 2 1/2-hour screening session for each applicant, that he could recommend more than half for jobs either in the factory or at home. This week eight women and one man so selected were at work on the Berkeley assembly line of B & K Enterprises, making toys, while eight women and three men were doing similar assembly work at home.

High Caliber. Finding a job after a stint in a mental hospital is so tough that many patients, discharged as recovered, become despondent and wind up in the hospital again. Dr. Poindexter wanted to do something about this. So did Warrington Stokes, executive director of the Alameda County Mental Health Association, and Stanley J. Radford, 38, a salesman who had spent six months in a VA hospital after a breakdown. It was Radford who noticed that two University of California students were building up a toy-manufacturing business, sold them the idea of recruiting their work force from former mental patients, and got them together with Poindexter and Stokes.

Bob Baron, 23, a chemical engineering major (he has since quit school to give full time to the business), and Ray Keche-ley, 22, majoring in business administration, were won over by Dr. Poindexter's offer to screen applicants without a fee. Even the scheme's sponsors were surprised by the applicants' qualifications: fully half had some college education, and about 20% had college degrees. In their case histories could be found the whole gamut of emotional illnesses. Some were still on active follow-up treatment; others were taking only tranquilizers. Some were rated as fully rehabilitated--except for inability to get work. Average time out of a job since leaving hospital was 3 1/2 years.

Incentive for Work. Said one of the first women hired, a former research assistant in a highly specialized field: "Assembling toys isn't intellectually stimulating, but the project is stimulating, and this gives me an incentive for work. It's a sort of therapy, too, to be able to talk freely to the others here and know they'll understand. But most important is the fact that you can get the job honestly. You don't have to lie on the application. In most places, if you answer truthfully you just don't get the job." Said another, a victim of anxiety neurosis: "Here I feel that if I did have an anxiety attack, they'd understand. So I don't have one." But the B & K bosses say they are not running a rehabilitation center. Any worker who fails to perform adequately, they insist, will be fired. So far, none has been, and indications are that B & K's labor turnover will be below average.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.