Honesty and Mental Illness

Posted on August 27, 2003 in Compassion Privacy Silicon Valley

Sometimes a quiet cry in your ear gets louder as it lingers in the mind. A friend said to me the other day: “Why is it that I have to give up my rights to privacy just because I am mentally ill?”

I comforted her, but I have to admit that the answer that I gave was only a crutch built to fit the times we live in. This friend of mine wants to work in a job she likes. In the course of her training for her vocation, she’s coming under unusual stresses. To obtain relief, she feels that she must either tough it out or go to her advisers to ask for another placement. She must tell them that she is mentally ill. To all of us who must rely on psychotropic medications, that phrase is a drum of infamy. It means to too many people “this person is not to be trusted”.

Neither my friend or I see it that way. Some people have ticky hearts. Others have asthma, diabetes, etc. We have problems involving the chemistry of our brain. People take this too far, however. Witness the case of another friend of mine, a statistician with an advanced degree from a top ten university. When she was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, she went to her company and shared the information. She is an honest person who wants to work under the right circumstances as we all do. She decided to tell her company that she had this disease.

The effect was quite different from what she expected. Suddenly, as a mentally ill person, she could no longer be trusted to do her job. When personnel officers and her manager — none of whom had sufficient training to understand how to accomodate her special need — got involved in her life, they started moving things around on her. Was being a statistician too stressful for her, perhaps? Let’s reassign you. How would you like to be a receptionist — a job which everyone who has never done it knows is entirely without stress? One blow like this after another followed upon her revelation to her employers. Eventually they drove her out of this supposed avant-garde of employee relations in the computer industry. I went with her to collect her things. I remember how the cubicles emptied, how the boss gave her this worried look as if she was going to start throwing the contents of her boxes about. She went out to the car and cried.

My advice to my friend was to be open about the nature of her problem, to seek support. I hope that in a university/medical setting, she will find more understanding than this other bipolar friend is. But I find myself stuck between advices: tell or don’t tell. What if they aren’t? What if they do ruin her life as this other place ruined the life of my other bipolar friend? The stress of the uncertainty is terrible enough. As I see it, either way her dream of doing something she does well for pay is at risk of foundering. I can only hope and pray that her experience with honesty will be a healthier one than the other had.