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>Prejudice, stigma and loss of earning potential meant that the people who experienced mental health difficulty were shunted to the margins of society where we

>Prejudice, stigma and loss of earning potential meant that the people who experienced mental health difficulty were shunted to the margins of society where we became a social problem to be solved by others spending on our behalf. 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).

bpchaps 11y ago
Incredibly unfortunate. 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.
- jamble 11y ago
  I'm sorry you had to go through that. That is extremely unfair. I also hate writing about mental health but in lieu of your last comment... I will not delete this in hopes it helps - at the very least please know you are not alone. 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).
  - bpchaps 11y ago
    Genuinely appreciated. I feel you, man. 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.
    - jamble 11y ago
      > the conversation was essentially me asking for help in avoiding distractions. > 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 :)
- justinpombrio 11y ago
  > 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? How about the (incomplete) truth? "Some borderline harassment that I'd rather not discuss."
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    Yeah, just make it sound like an experience you'd rather not relive.
- baus 11y ago
  I've kind of given up on worrying about being judged about being Bipolar. There is nothing I can do about it, and I think there are some benefits to being Bipolar. I'm not saying I always enjoy it, but it is part of who I am. 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).
  - bpchaps 11y ago
    Agreed about not worrying about being bipolar. It is what it is, and the only thing you can do is plan around it and develop heuristics that make the most sense, considering. 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.
    - baus 11y ago
DanBC 11y ago
I've spoken to people who were convicted of a crime, spent some time in prison, and were then transferred to a medium secure forensic unit for treatment for their severe mental illness. 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.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  It's that way in at least some cases in the US too. I mean no one has any sympathy for sex offenders but for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalinga_State_Hospital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalinga_State_Hospital can/does hold people indefinitely.

bpchaps 11y ago

Incredibly unfortunate. 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.

jamble 11y ago
I'm sorry you had to go through that. That is extremely unfair. I also hate writing about mental health but in lieu of your last comment... I will not delete this in hopes it helps - at the very least please know you are not alone. 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).
- bpchaps 11y ago
  Genuinely appreciated. I feel you, man. 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.
  - jamble 11y ago
    > the conversation was essentially me asking for help in avoiding distractions. > 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 :)
justinpombrio 11y ago
> 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? How about the (incomplete) truth? "Some borderline harassment that I'd rather not discuss."
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  Yeah, just make it sound like an experience you'd rather not relive.
baus 11y ago
I've kind of given up on worrying about being judged about being Bipolar. There is nothing I can do about it, and I think there are some benefits to being Bipolar. I'm not saying I always enjoy it, but it is part of who I am. 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).
- bpchaps 11y ago
  Agreed about not worrying about being bipolar. It is what it is, and the only thing you can do is plan around it and develop heuristics that make the most sense, considering. 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.
  - baus 11y ago

DanBC 11y ago

I've spoken to people who were convicted of a crime, spent some time in prison, and were then transferred to a medium secure forensic unit for treatment for their severe mental illness. 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.

Avshalom 11y ago
It's that way in at least some cases in the US too. I mean no one has any sympathy for sex offenders but for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalinga_State_Hospital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalinga_State_Hospital can/does hold people indefinitely.