Bipolar 2 From Inside and Out

Posts tagged ‘disclosing mental illness’

SMI in Higher Ed

I recently discovered a book written by Katie Rose Guest Pryal called Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education. I was a little behind on reading the book—it came out in 2017. But I can’t imagine much in academia has changed since then.

In the book, Pryal presents short, readable essays about her experiences and those of other people who experience bipolar disorder, OCD, anxiety, ADD, and schizophrenia and must navigate the systems of working in academia. Pryal herself, now a law professor specializing in disability studies, says in the introduction that “academia isn’t an easy place to be if your brain isn’t quite right.” One interviewee remarked, “They hired you for your mind…Why would you volunteer that there’s something wrong with it?” The first chapter includes essays on disclosure.

If that were all the book covered, it would still be a revelation and an important work. But The Mind Interrupted is relevant to people with SMI in other areas of life as well. Just look at these essay titles: Disclosure Blues, Breaking the Mad Genius Myth, Working When Your Brain Isn’t, Handling Personal Tragedies Around You, How to Have the Accommodations Talk, Believe Your Colleagues With Disabilities, Trigger Warnings Are a Disability Issue, and more. These are issues that everyone with SMI has to deal with, whether they work in a burger joint, a business office, or aren’t employed at all. Given her circumstances, it’s understandable that Pryal focuses on higher education, but I feel that this is a valuable book for anyone living with SMI.

I’ve written before about how we refer to mental illness, SMI, brain illness, behavioral health, etc. Pryal uses a term that hadn’t occurred to me—psychiatric disability. It brought me up short. I have bipolar disorder. Is my condition a psychiatric disability? Ignoring the fact that I didn’t get disability when I applied for it, I would have to say it is. I have limitations that interfere with my ability to make a living. I have to deal with the question of whether to disclose my mental status whenever I apply for a job. I’m lucky that I now work independently from home and can basically make my own hours, an accommodation that likely would not have been available in the publishing companies where I used to work, even if I had asked for it.

When I was in academia as a grad student and teaching assistant, I hadn’t been diagnosed with bipolar, but I certainly had it. The stress was nearly incapacitating. I remember having a meltdown in a poetry class, which was ignored by the other students and the professor, aside from a few sidelong looks. I got one bad student review—scathing, really—and couldn’t bring myself to read any student reviews for the remaining three semesters. It’s similar to an experience that Pryal recounts in Life of the Mind Interrupted.

My experiences bear out what Pryal says in her book. As she explains, “This is a book about mental illness and academia. But this is also a book about so much more than that: it’s about grief, and friendship, and collegiality, and accessibility, and tragedy. It is about trying to get by in a world that fears you, that believes you are unfit for your job, that wants to take your children away….I’d spent my years in academia in hiding.” And so did the people Pryal interviewed for her book. As they were struggling to reach the safety of tenure, disclosure was not an option. Accommodations such as altered schedules were not requested or offered, even though people with mental illness are a protected class under ADA.

There’s so much more in Life of the Mind Interrupted: intersectionality, motherhood, creativity, language, students with disabilities, stigma, teaching, allies, privacy, and other essential topics. If you skip this book because you’re not in the institutions of higher education, you’re missing something truly important.

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Mental Health

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Should You Lie About Your Disorder?

We all know that when writing a resume, you should write either “good” or “excellent” when you refer to your health. Any other response will make it certain that your resume will be headed straight for the circular file.
But what about your mental health? Most resumes and most job applications don’t include a space for that, but what if they did? What would you answer? What should you answer? And should you tell the truth if you do answer?
 
In one corner of England, job seekers were encouraged to hedge their bets or to flat-out lie. The British newspaper The Guardian reported that welfare personnel “have urged jobseekers who have depression to hide their diagnosis and only admit on work applications that they are experiencing ‘low mood.'” 
 
Fortunately, there has been a backlash from mental health organizations, who describe the advice as an “outrage” likely to increase stigma. They point out that “the law provided protection to disabled people, including those with mental health problems, if their disability has a substantial, adverse, and long-term effect on normal daily activities.”
 
The welfare department in question brushed off the controversy by saying the suggestion was only “well-intentioned local advice” and encouraging people seeking jobs to “speak freely about a health condition or disability.” But that’s not a choice that everyone is willing to make.
 
Whether or not to disclose one’s mental health condition when applying for a job is not an easy decision. American law (at the moment) protects employees and potential employees under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). But many people are rightly suspicious that disclosing a mental illness at the application is a one-way ticket to unemployment. Even when applications invite you to disclose and pointedly proclaim that they abide by EEOC regulations, many people choose not to disclose.
 
Disclosing after you’ve been hired or have been working at a place for a while is another matter. Many people (including me) have lost jobs because their bosses and coworkers don’t understand mental illness. There is plenty of motivation never to mention it.
 
That may not always be possible, however. Sometimes, the symptoms of bipolar disorder or another serious mental illness are obvious and negatively affect work. (I’m included here, too.) If a person isn’t able to do the work – for whatever reason – it’s understandable that they will be let go.
 
That brings us to the subject of accommodations that permit a person to do the work. Under ADA law, persons with disabilities, including mental disorders, are to be given “reasonable accommodations” to help them perform their job duties. For blind, deaf, or mobility-impaired workers, these accommodations are obviously necessary and most employers can and will provide them. (There is also no question as to whether to disclose these disabilities or not. Visible disabilities are more widely understood than invisible ones.)
 
Accommodations for mental disorders need not be difficult, either. Solutions such as flextime, work-at-home situations, or time off for appointments are more and more being offered to all employees, regardless of ability level, and these can certainly help people with mental illness, too. Other reasonable accommodations might include flexible break times, an office with a door or full-spectrum lighting, or the understanding that phone calls and emails need not be returned instantly. Of course, to receive these accommodations, one must disclose the disorder and negotiate the possible solutions, which can certainly be daunting, if not impossible, for those with anxiety disorders, for example.
 
But what we’re talking about here is not whether to disclose a disability on an application or to an employer. What we are talking about is misrepresenting a potentially disabling condition – or to use the less polite term, lying about it. I don’t have “occasional mood swings,” I have bipolar disorder. My depression is not simply a “low mood,” it can be debilitating. And I suspect that even admitting to a “low mood” might be greeted with something less than understanding by a potential or actual employer.
 
Ayaz Manji, a senior policy officer at a mental health charity in England, said of the semi-disclosure policy, “Anyone who discloses a mental health problem at work deserves to be treated with respect, and jobcentres should not be reinforcing stigma by advising people not to disclose.”
 
He’s right, of course. Disclosing or not disclosing is a hard enough choice for the mentally ill. Lying about one’s condition should not even be a consideration. And isn’t lying on resumes and applications an automatic cause for dismissal? 
 
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Mental Health

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