Why mental health idealism might not overcome the market
thenewmentalhealth.org
thenewmentalhealth.org
Making it known that you have a mental illness is simply not the same as having a physical handicap (please note I am not trying to downplay the pains of physical handicap or any other illnesses). People simply do not know how to react to mental illness. Or they’re incapable of understanding. Many people would like to help their friends in these situations but without proper understanding, it’s arguably worse than being a bystander. Comments like “cheer up!”, “just get over it!”, “it’s not that bad” often are not that helpful at all. Even if their struggles seem reasonable to an outsider, the pain that the sufferer feels is very real, and to them, insurmountable. Never mind the fact that the social stigma often means speaking up about these issues means social or professional suicide, resulting in most of us not speaking out about it and feeling hopeless.
Posts about mental health show up on the HN frontpage every once in a while (or more frequently, in /ask), which is a step forward because there is simply not enough awareness on these issues that are so prevalent, especially among the HN demographics. But we still have a lot of work to do.
Side note: Greg Baugues started a community called devpressed[1] for developers struggling with mental illness a while back, and also gave a talk on the topic[2]
It actually triggered the idea for my startup: http://synaptitude.me/
Essentially, the goal is to provide mental health help/treatment without the need to go to an office, thus reducing the barrier to get help.
Obviously, that's not exactly what you are talking about, but the end-goal, is to build a community around this form of treatment, and remove much of the stigma. The system/program/app we built also makes it really clear to people what issues are, and how to improve them. The clear way our website shows progress/issues helps remove a lot of the mystery and can help users express issues and show progress with loved ones.
We are also looking for people to enter our trial (which we are in the process of organizing): http://synaptitude.me/blog/now-accepting-trial-participants/
Given that a mere nudge of the mouse on this page pushes you to a "Subscribe" overlay before the reader even gets to read the whole page (with no stated opt-out), I think your response will be a tad muted. (Workaround: click elsewhere on the greyed-out part of the page)
It's unfortunate that sharing first hand experience with mental illness incriminates you. A big contributor to the negative stigma has to be that there is little upside and huge downside to being open about personal experience with it (unless you are using it as an excuse for a crime).
I have to constantly keep myself in check to make sure that I don't reveal too much about my mental health. The biggest example I can think of is one from recent times where I left a company for what amounted to being made fun of for being "weird" or "crazy". At no point during that employment would there have been an acceptable time to bring up the issues I was having to the folks doing the teasing. It actually got to the point of me going to HR about it, where the head of HR had no idea what bipolar is, despite having a degree in psychology. When I quit, I discussed with my boss and her boss (effectively the CTO) about the problems.. they told me to "grow thicker skin". I then told why it wasn't so simple, to which they took 40 steps back and apologized in, "it was just a joke" fashion.
Fast forward to interviewing, where the question of "Why'd you leave your previous company so soon?" comes up. What am I supposed to say? I can give some well thought out BS reasons, but nothing about that feels right. The situation is unbearably tough and is only getting tougher. I wish there was a way around it, but when competition is built around vapid shallowness, a solution is nowhere in sight.
I try my best to talk about it my own experience with mental health on HN, yet every now and then, I hesitate about how much it'll affect future prospects and end up deleting it, despite good intentions. It's fucking frustrating.
I personally had an employer issue where 'short term disability' could never be approved from insurance for mental health, unless I was at risk of hurting myself or others. So I had to use my PTO for mental health days, according to HR. I was assured by my bosses that I'd be given the same protection as "someone on the team who had cancer", but I suppose that was not true as I was soon let go for running out of time-off when I had to go to a trauma group therapy session. I'm not sure if how they let me go was legal ... but I digress.
I can definitely relate to your post, and my advice would be to tell new employers the truth: you had / have some [chronic] health issues, and unfortunately had to quit to place your health first for some time. I understand a hiring decision or social factors may be affected by this. The fact that 1) we have to evaluate that as a risk in the first place, or 2) anticipate explaining details of our health, is outright ridiculous and you have my sympathy.
if your employer/HR seems clueless or is not giving you the feedback you'd expect, perhaps explain how your symptoms affect your job instead of only telling them a diagnosis. (Edit: It does sound like you'd tried that with your boss, sorry if this is not good advice.) Diagnosis are thrown around so much in the media, after all, who knows what thoughts about "depression" or "bipolar" are conjured in different people?
I hope that in time the stigma will change so people like you and I can have more acceptance, less teasing, and more reliable rights in the workplace (and in general, really).
When I spoke to HR, it was a very serious conversation. Essentially, the conversation was essentially me asking for help in avoiding distractions. There were tons at that place, so my request was just for some tiny modifications of the team with some hope that there would be an understanding. I explained how bipolar worked, what it did, etc. Apparently she never actually talked about it with anyone besides her boss. When I left, I was strongly considering filing a discrimination suit, but eventually decided not to as my mood stabilized.
Thing is, though, it seems that these problems are entirely systemic. Every place I've worked at has been like this. New social groups I've been a part of have been the same way. It's frustrating, but the silver lining is that the groups that I get a long with, I get along with /very/ well. Perhaps more so than other social groups I've seen.
I don't want to say it gets better. It won't. All we can do is take our medicines, understand how our mental processes work and act accordingly. Considering this is all we have, we can't give up and can only work on improving ourselves, despite our own push back.
> All we can do is take our medicines, understand how our mental processes work and act accordingly.
I definitely know that feel. I do think that things will get better socially over time, but perhaps I'm too much an optimist, who knows :)
How about the (incomplete) truth? "Some borderline harassment that I'd rather not discuss."
Being up front about it is part of the solution for me. It forces me to own my condition and focus on avoiding situations which are triggers for me -- to embrace my limitations.
I'm not sure of the nature of your condition, but for me it isn't like it is a constant struggle. It comes and it goes.
It has also become apparent that there are A LOT of people out there in very successful careers who have mental conditions. I don't have any data to support this, but I actually think it is becoming a more significant issue.
My theory is it better to accept your condition and do what you need to do to take care of yourself than to ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist (which I think a lot of people including myself in the past try to do).
That said, the problem isn't with the overall thinking patterns, the problem comes when the mood swings are at their worst. When I'm at my worst, there's effectively nothing I can do. My heuristic models are still observable and workable, but they fall apart from absurd rationalizations. I feel that this is the reason why bipolar has such a high suicide rate, particularly with type II over I.
The career aspects are very interesting. My career has been very well so far. I'm 27 and I've managed to hold many respectable positions and have a few potential and very dissimilar positions in the running. Algorithmic trader, senior infrastructure engineer, data scientist and security engineer. I'm not entirely sure what aspect of my mental model allowed these things to happen, but I don't think these options would've been possible without bipolar and its comorbids.
I think it's difficult to accept (not necessarily stop worrying) your own mental health condition depending on what stage you're at in your understanding. For example, if you just received a diagnosis, how do you accept it when you haven't had enough time to build up an understanding? It's something that takes time and it's something that needs to be emphasized that's often not.
This is the type of thinking I would like to see more of. Bipolar is a very complex condition in my opinion. Probably more complex than I wanted to understand. But I have the sense that I would not be the person I am with out Bipolar -- both in positive and negative aspects.
The "absurd rationalizations." I totally get that. It is like the logical side needed to be effective in this profession comes back to haunt you. When those situations arise, I do think it is time to take a step back from work.
I think we suffer from the demands to constantly produce. That is unrealistic, not just for those of us with Bipolar, but for the population in general. I think many people suffer from unrelenting nature of modern life, but the consequences manifest them differently in different people.
Every single one of them said they preferred the prison to the hospital.
This is because prisoners have sentences that they serve, but patients don't - they're just treated until they're well enough to go back to the prison population.
In general "I have a severe mental illness" is not enough to help a defendant get off. The test is something like "I have a severe mental illness, and it was controlling me during my time, and I did not know what I was doing". If we just look at the population of people with a mental illness we see that most of them don't meet this strict requirement.
Of course, this in England. I guess things are different in the US.
I would guess that a print magazine is not an agile enough platform to jump-start such a dialog effectively. Obvious comparison; tumblr, among its multitude of various unusual communities, hosts a thriving little culture of mental illness thought, almost entirely derived from the freely available writing of non-professionals with first-person experience living with such conditions. A zero-buy-in medium is much friendlier to people with little initial commitment to the subject; a decentralized medium with no gatekeepers is able to fluidly adapt to the changing opinions of its user-base.