“Everything just slowly but gradually just disappeared away from me, everything”
“I’d worked all my life. I’ve never not worked from when I got out of school. I was always - I had a really bad confidence issue, like really bad, low confidence and low self-esteem…I used to have to drink to be around people…. Then I would drink faster so I could go out, and then it all just escalated… something would always happen, like something violent or something… I would always black out when I was drinking, like nine times out of ten, well, ten times out of ten, I would black
out, and something would have happened.” (Female, 30-34, urban)
This evidence both reinforces and illustrates some of the ways in which SMD is typically associated with low levels of employment, as reported from the quantitative evidence above.
