These next several posts will be dedicated to stories about how my mental illness was accepted or not by my various employers over the years. This first story is about my first job out of college as a paralegal for a law office in a major New England city. In the post below, I compare paralegal work and project management work.
When I started working as a paralegal, the Americans with Disabilities Act had not yet been passed. This was 1986. When I signed up to work for this law firm, I was asked to fill out a questionnaire. As memory serves, one of the questions asked about whether I had a mental illness. This was before it was illegal to ask this question. The ADA did not get passed until 1990.
At the time in 1986, I opted not to be truthful in the questionnaire. I felt it was my right and my knowledge that the employer could not or should not access. This created the start of the process of always wondering whether it was good to declare my bipolar illness or not with an employer.
During the two years that I was a paralegal at this law firm, I exhausted my sick leave due to the bipolar diagnosis. I was still in process of getting the right combination of lithium and Tegretol together. I was also adjusting to taking meds on a regular basis. As many may know often it takes a year or two before you can accept your illness and that you will need to stay on meds likely indefinitely.
I don’t recall whether I was put on short-term disability during this time or not. But there was never talk of letting me go or firing me because of the bipolar illness or because of exceeding the allotted sick time for my station at that law firm.
In general, the lack of a negative reaction to my being out ill was a positive outcome in the long-run. Today I consider this “tolerance” of my mental health needs to be a very positive outcome with an employer. I had not yet been certified as a project manager – that would come later in 2002. All in all and in retrospect, I found that working as a paralegal and having a mental illness were a combination that was somewhat manageable for me and for the employer.
Years later in the 2000s I found that working as a project manager and having a mental illness was not a manageable combination at all. The stigma associated with the mental illness particularly in the project management workspace was just too great. This stigma has been discussed at various of my former blogposts.
What appears to be a deciding factor between “tolerance” and “intolerance” of the mental health condition is whether the specific job is in a supporting role rather than in a leadership role. As long as I was a paralegal and providing support to a team of attorneys, the idea of having some sort of mental health complications was “acceptable.” However, a project management role is/was a leadership role and therefore creates/created less “accepted” or “acceptable” responses proffered by the project management organization in the project/program management workplace. I wonder if I had been an attorney at the same law firm whether the same level of “tolerance” would have been extended to me. Or, if as an attorney I would have been in a leadership role and, therefore, the complications of mental illness would have also been less “accepted” and “acceptable.”
Mental Health is Health 