The Toll of Holding a Job While Coping With Mental Health Issues

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Absenteeism is one of the most noticeable symptoms of people who deal with mental health problems while holding down a job. But there’s also presenteeism, when people show up for work yet are unable to perform their best because of how they’re feeling. And the need to take breaks from working can lead to résumés with lots of jobs with short tenures. We spoke to a number of people about their experiences managing their mental health in the workplace. They had jobs that offered varying degrees of flexibility and at companies both large and small. Consistently they talked about the fear of disclosure. Underemployment and gaps in their résumés were common themes. Some who chose to open up to their superiors say getting a positive response made it easier for them to manage their mental health. Here are accounts of people who are trying to establish successful careers while living with mental health conditions in America.

A Silent Struggle

Kevin’s résumé has holes. There were high points: After completing a master’s in communications, he landed positions at one of the country’s biggest insurance companies and one of the top accounting firms, working his way up to managing 12 colleagues. But he never felt comfortable telling a boss about his depression. During particularly bad bouts, he found himself on performance improvement plans or, worse, fired. He attempted suicide twice and took prolonged breaks between jobs to recover.

“I had to really get my story together as I applied for more and more positions because the more positions I got, the more I had short tenures,” he says. Eventually, he decided to take a job at a nonprofit, Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, where he could explain his mental health struggles to his boss and take days off when he didn’t feel like he could bring his best self to work. Just being able to open up and manage his condition honestly helped alleviate some of his worst symptoms.

“In the past with other jobs I would’ve just called in sick and not explained anything,” he says. At the alliance, he was able to tell his manager how he was feeling, which was met with an understanding that he hadn’t experienced previously. “When you’re surrounded with a culture like that, it makes it much, much easier to have a good mindset.”

It is in some ways the ideal outcome for a person living with a mental health condition. But at the nonprofit, Kevin, 51, was making about 40% less than he was in the corporate world. “One of the common themes with people living with depression is underemployment,” he says. “They’ve had so many different gaps in their résumé that they’re settling for jobs that are beneath their skill set.” And despite feeling so strongly about mental health advocacy that he took a job at a nonprofit in the field, Kevin asked that his last name be withheld for fear of jeopardizing future job opportunities.

To Disclose or Not to Disclose?

Allison Barksdale, who has a bipolar disorder diagnosis and is 55, had her first manic episode while at work in her 20s. She took a brief leave to recover. Upon returning, her manager promised her a recommendation for future jobs elsewhere if she left quietly. She went on to have a successful career and complete an executive MBA, all while keeping her mental health condition under wraps.

She decided she wanted to open her own business, but her timing was off: Her tea and flower shop failed during the financial crisis. These days she’s cobbling together her income from some substitute teaching and a leadership coaching business she started, but she’s looking for full-time employment. On job applications, she often finds herself having to answer some routine personal questions, like ‘Are you male or female?’ or ‘Are you a veteran?’ Then there’s ‘Do you have a disability?’ “That one is a question that stumped me,” she says, because her mental health has put her out of commission from work in the past. Given three choices—yes, no, or decline to answer—she chooses the last one, she says, because “I don’t understand this question, and I don’t understand the ramifications of how you answer it.”

An Accepting Culture

By everyone else’s account, China McCarney was living the dream. A college baseball player at California State University at Northridge on the professional track, he was in his junior year—the “money year” when players have the most leverage with MLB teams to max out their financial potential. “You have 3 million people telling you a different story every day,” he says. That winter he was driving up the coast for a vacation when he thought he was starting to have a heart attack. The pins and needles and feeling of adrenaline were so overwhelming he had to pull over and call his father, who drove an hour and a half to pick him up. He now recognizes it was a severe panic attack, but his life as an athlete was so structured that he hadn’t had the time to slow down and figure it out. That year he was drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays and went on to play professional baseball for three years.

“Athletics keeps you in a little bubble,” he says. “I never had to soul-search because I was told who I was. I was a baseball player.” But, he adds, “I didn’t really have a dream job.”

McCarney, 32, decided to retire after realizing he was playing for “so many other people other than myself.” That started a descent into heavy drinking. “I abused alcohol heavily just to kind of numb the thoughts and just went it alone, I didn’t really tell anybody I was having panic attacks when I’d go to the store and go to pick up food,” he says. Despite this, he’d started a job as an instructor at Jaeger Sports, a sports training company, which he was enjoying. But he kept hiding the severe panic attacks he was experiencing until one day he found himself crippled in a store parking lot. “I kind of just broke down in my car, and I was like, ‘I cannot do this anymore.’ ” He started therapy and has been on what he describes as a path to healing ever since. “The therapy and the therapist and this whole process has given me permission to be who I am and just kind of embrace it.”

With that in mind, he decided to sit down with the owner of the company and tell him about his panic attacks and that he was in therapy, trying to get help. He was met with an unexpectedly positive reaction. “He was very understanding, caring,” McCarney says. “And was just like, ‘The No. 1 thing is that you get better and you get healthy. Business is secondary.’ ” His boss even offered to help him out financially. He’s aware it’s a privilege that might not be offered to everyone. “I was very fortunate he was open to discuss it, and I perform really well at the business so it gives me obviously some leeway.”

Kevin’s Quest

Kevin’s employment at the nonprofit ended for reasons he says were unrelated to his mental health, and he’s back on the hunt for a job. He’s looking for a senior-level role, which isn’t easy to come by with the gaps in his résumé, and he’s worried he’s burned too many bridges in Chicago to find a decent job there. While he’s open to relocating, he’s aware that moving somewhere without a support system is a risk for him given what he’s been through with his mental health before.

He’s heard the rhetoric about companies encouraging employees to be more open about their mental health. He thinks it’s less about new hires and more about those who have been around for a while and have proved their value. Were Kevin to have an episode and need to take leave in his first year on the job, for example, his understanding is that most short-term disability programs wouldn’t even cover him. Kevin found himself awake at 4 a.m. one early October morning having an anxiety attack. “I’m going deeper into debt and really scared about my future,” he says. He’s racked up $90,000 in credit card debt during his bouts of unemployment. His health insurance costs $860 a month, which he can just cover with the $900 a month from unemployment.

“I think for people in my situation that being able to immerse yourself more in the gig economy of short-term assignments of things of that nature probably is much more conducive than a corporate job,” he says. “It’s not ideally what I want, but I may be forced to do that. Here I am, a master’s degree person with all this experience. It doesn’t really matter all the accolades I have, this is my situation.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Eric Gelman at egelman3@bloomberg.net

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