If I stop pretending to be symptom free, will I become more emphatically bipolar than I am now? How would it affect my life? Would I become more, or less, likely to form strong friendships? Would I become more, or less, well?
I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the word “stigma”. Stigma in the context of “erasing the stigma of mental illness”. What does that mean, exactly? What are people getting at? Do I feel stigmatized, and is it possible to feel stigmatized if I live in the closet, so to speak, about my illness?
I’ve always thought the idea of a public movement about stigma was a bit worrisome. Is the idea that we try to shame the public in to pretending that the symptoms of mental illness are not creepy, disturbing and disruptive to be around — that employers should be obligated to retain employees who may be quite unbalanced because they are mentally ill? The political independent in me thinks that’s hogwash.
Pretending not to have the symptoms of a major mental illness is dear to me. I become terribly upset with myself when I realize I’ve lost control over some aspect of that – that I have given someone a reason to wonder what’s wrong with me.
I have good reason to pretend I am normal. Attempting to introduce my symptoms in to a conversation (i.e., “Ug, I’m really feeling paranoid/anxious/unable to focus/suddenly demotivated/hypomanic/hearing music that isn’t there/having horribly intrusive thoughts/having racing thoughts, etc., etc. lately”) zooms me away from the person I’m talking to. No matter how comfortable I may have felt with the person up to that point, or even how intimate our relationship may be, I feel and see the freezing chill that suddenly surrounds us; the utter distrust thrown in my direction. The person loses confidence in me, usually forever. The person may, in fact, turn on me in the future. It isn’t difficult to imagine the rolled eyes when my name comes up, or the leap to conclusions about my character, or the utter dissipation of respect for or confidence in me.
Is that stigma at work? I’m not sure. It certainly may be. Is that a reasonable reaction? I’m not sure. It certainly may be.
What I wish for is compassion. I wish for encouragement to seek assistance.
In my last job I was up front with each successive manager about my mental illness. Each manager thanked me for sharing the information with them. One – the first manager I told – reacted in what I thought was rather the perfect way.
When I initially went to work for that company I was very ill. All of my symptoms were in the red zone. I developed a plan of attack to try to get them under control, but it required living with my parents in another town for a few weeks and making major changes in the number and amount of medications I was taking. It wasn’t at all clear to me that I would be able to work through that period, but I wanted to try to. I talked to my manager, explained the situation. As it turned out, one of her best friends was bipolar.
After getting approval from her own manager, my manager laid out the ground rules in a very open way: I would continue to work remotely while I stayed with my parents; I would remain under a psychiatrist’s care; I would continue to take my medication (“I’ll know if you don’t,” she warned); I would not work over time (I’d been working overnight at the office, sometimes 20 hours at a stretch). Last, but not least, was this simple rule: I would do my job.
Because of my manager’s support, I kept my job and I followed her rules — and I improved tremendously. Knowing that she understood that I had a major illness that could be managed made a huge, huge difference for me. I blossomed.
I approached my first annual review with resignation, expecting to be told that the special treatment I’d been given, and the severe troubles I had exhibited, would leave me in the bottom category of performance ranking. I was surprised, then, when the manager gave me a raise, handed me a bit more responsibility, and praised the way I had fought through my crises.
In the last two years of my employment at that company (I worked there for eight years), I began to become ill again. When I went in to a crises I told my manager (a different manager, by then) that I needed time off, and he begrudgingly gave me a week. He also made it clear that he didn’t want to be involved. He also made it clear it would be better for my career if I kept it to myself. He also sent me a phone number for some group in the HR department and encouraged me to “officially” register myself under a special designation of some kind, but he side-stepped the reasons for doing so. When I attempted to explain a little about Bipolar Disorder to him he interrupted me and told me it was inappropriate for him to discuss it with me.
I felt that the company had put a lot of faith in me, and I didn’t want to let them down. I’d been promoted. I had a big job I had been excelling at. The message was clear: the impression was that I was using a trendy diagnosis as an excuse to ask for special treatment.
And from the day I told that manager, really, my career began going down the tubes. And so did I. I loved my job in a very big way, and my identity had become wrapped up in it. I was afraid that if I failed it would mean that the pride I felt in having overcome the worst time in my life was just an illusion. And so I pretended not to be ill in a very big way. I tried getting off medications. I distanced myself from my diagnoses. I went back to my old habit of working all night in an attempt to make up for the utter loss of focus I was experiencing during the day. The project I was managing won a big award. I was given a bonus and a “perfect” rating at my next annual review.
And then my job was given to someone else.
And then I pretty much fell apart.
A few months before I quite my job I told my new manager about being Bipolar. This manager told me her sister, also, had Bipolar Disorder, but she said it in such a way that I thought she might as well have been saying, “You’re one of those people — one of those people who makes excuses all the time.” I got the feeling she didn’t particularly like her sister. And, like my manager before her, she advised me that further discussion would be inappropriate.
By the time I left I was unable to work, really, which was probably OK since I didn’t have any work to do. At all. I had been promoted to those nether regions of corporate America that are reserved for difficult employees who might have cause for a law suit if they are fired. I spent my morning surfing the Internet, and my afternoons drinking. I decided to leave the company one afternoon on a work day when I found myself shopping at Macy’s instead of sitting at my desk because nobody was looking for me any more. ‘Surely I have more pride than this,’ I thought to myself.
I guess, then, that stigma (to me) is really a lack of compassion. A lack of discussion. A general mistrust based on a diagnosis. A lack of support. A kind of shunning as a reward for reaching out for understanding and assistance that I’m not sure I deserve. Stigma means asking for special treatment and not being deemed special enough to get it.
I miss those days at the beginning of my career with that company. The thrill of working through something terrible in an appropriate and honest way. My boss rooting for me from the sidelines.
I don’t know which I wish for more: that I had done a better job of pretending I wasn’t sick, or that I had done a better job of standing up for myself because I was sick. But living in between those lines didn’t help. That’s for sure.
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