Return to Work or Not: The Paths to Psychiatric Disability and Back.
Päivi Rissanen, Sami Pirkola, Turkka Näppilä and 4 others
PMID 40788560WHAT IT FOUND
Among 18,373 people granted a first disability pension for mental disorder, 98% of permanent pensioners remained on pension, while temporary pensioners moved to work, unemployment, study, or remained on pension.
Key findings
01The study included 18,373 people granted a first disability pension for mental disorder, 8,615 temporarily and 9,758 permanently.
02After temporary disability pension, people mainly returned to work, unemployment or studying, or remained on pension; 98% of those permanently retired remained on pension.
03For people with a steady working career before disability, high education, affective disorder, and anxiety or stress-related disorder were associated with returning to work.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
Only people who could be followed for 3 years from pension start were included. The follow-up was 3 years, so longer-term work paths are not shown. Disability pension systems and benefit rules vary between countries, so the paths may not look the same elsewhere. When a person had more than one state in a month, the analysis used the dominant state, which may hide simultaneous states. The paper describes patterns and associations over time; it does not test whether rehabilitation, psychotherapy, or pension type caused any outcome.
Declared interests
The supplied text names the Finnish National Research Fund and Tampere University, including Tampere University Hospital, as funders.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the associations with education, diagnosis, unemployment history, or rehabilitation as proof that any of these factors causes return to work. This paper followed pension records and described paths over time; it did not test an intervention.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →