There is no easy way to tell other people you have manic-depressive illness; if there is, I haven’t found it. So despite the fact that most people that I have told have been very understanding — some remarkably so — I remain haunted by the occasions when the response was unkind, condescending or lacking in even a semblance of empathy. The thought of discussing my illness in a public forum has been, until quite recently, almost inconceivable. Much of this reluctance has been for professional reasons, but some has resulted from the cruelty, intentional or otherwise, that I have now and again experienced from colleagues or friends that I have chosen to confide in (p. 199).
My resolve not to tell the people closest to me (besides Mrs. Prufrock, of course) lasted perhaps a day or two. Partly, I had to tell someone. Besides that, I accrete friends very slowly, so most of my closest friends know me fairly well (I would have said “very well” before the diagnosis) and witnessed or heard about some of the events I’m now re-examining in light of the diagnosis.
That said, I had serious reservations about telling the part of the company food chain I deal with regularly. In no particular order I worried about:
- Whether they’d think I was making it up as an excuse for my recent poor performance.
- Whether they’d use it as an excuse to fire me — not directly, but by giving me less and less desireable tasks, territories and whatnot until one day I just said “screw it” and quit.
- Whether they’d use it as an excuse to fire me by micromanaging and micro-observing what I did, documenting each minor misstep to accumulate a mountain of woodchips sufficient to burn up my job.
- Whether they’d just fire me flat-out and roll the dice on what happened next.
I thought about it a while and finally decided I owned them the honest and what happened after that at least would happen on that basis.
So, I told, in this order, our EVP, our VP, our Dept. Mgr., and the sales manager to whom I reported. And the — well, for lack of a better word, quality of each one’s response fell in that same order.
The EVP was absolutely wonderful. He acknowledged right up front that he didn’t know much about manic-depression but would take the time to look it up. He seemed to sit up and pay more attention when I explained the typical length of misdiagnosis and the fact that antidepressants often aggravate bipolar symptoms. In general, he asked me to keep him posted. I presumed he didn’t need to know the ins and outs of every change in med or dosage, but I told him I’d keep him informed of any major changes in my condition.
The VP was out on vacation that week, so I got with the department manager. He professed even less knowledge. More from his body language than anything he said, I got the distinct impression that this was the first time anyone working for him ever had brought him anything so … personal, almost like a cat coming through the pet door with a live snake in its mouth. If you’re not a snake person, your first instinct is to back away as fast the hell as you can, then figure out if it’s venomous. And whether or not it is, at that point your likeliest course of action is to get the snake, if not the pair of them, back outside as quickly as possible.
Still, he handled it very professionally. also pledging to learn more about the disease.
Finally, my sales manager, and almost everything he said could be summed up in three words. What. An. Asshole.
He said he had he’d had “a relative” with “some mental problems,” so he was familiar with my situation. Familiar! People whose full-time 8-to-5 work in postdoctoral studies on manic-depression don’t say they’re “familiar” with it, but that didn’t stop this sales manager from doing so. He didn’t say he’d study up on the disorder. He didn’t even ask me to keep him informed. I walked out of the meeting thinking, “If it’d been anyone but me, someone almost toxically loyal to the company, you’d have just bought the company an ADA lawsuit — one you amost certainly would lose.”
Fiduciary responsiblity much?
I’ve gone ahead and discussed this with some of my oldest and closest friends. Most profess to know nothing about bipolar disorder. I’m still waiting to hear from one with whom I’d discussed going on Paxil back when that happened. I’ve received some puzzlement, but mostly, in about this order, reassurance and sympathy. I’m not going to run out and become the poster boy for NAMI, in part because I don’t know how this might affect my chances with any future employer/insurer with whom I might have to deal. But I feel I’ve discussed this with enough people, and the right people, for now. To the extent that I’m discussing it with you, well, I doubt it inasmuch as my visitor count has been zero consistently, you don’t know who I am and in this medium I could be anyone and/or making it all up anyway.
Still.
