“Nobody Talks about it”
I was talking to a depressed friend of mine a couple of years ago. She was almost entirely crippled by her depression and she could barely cope at work. I asked her why she wouldn’t tell her boss about her depression. Her reply,
“I can’t talk about it. Nobody talks about it. You just don’t bring it up here.”
“Here” was the company where she worked, and which was known for demanding high performance and late hours from its employees. She was right. If she told her boss that she couldn’t come in because she was depressed she probably would have lost her job.
I found this great article by Isabella Mori on GNIF Brain Blogger about the culture of silence surrounding mental illness in workplaces, and the real costs to our economy when people are told that “Nobody talks about it.”
You can read the article here: Mental Illness - It’s Not Talked About
isabella mori responds:
Posted: February 12th, 2007 at 12:39 pm →
hi - i’m the author of the article you reference (thanks, by the way). i wrote this article a little while ago. in the meantime, i’ve come across some interesting and sad examples of this stigma. one was where the co-workers of an employee of an otherwise very progressive company were explicitly forbidden to get in touch with that employee while he was off work, dealing with his bipolar disorder. and it was not as if his mental health issues had expressed themselves in any particularly bizarre way at work.