Suit-wearers who suffer

By JULIE MIDDLETON

The interviews - with both the recruiter and the prospective employers - had gone brilliantly.

Rebekah Holt, a Wellington IT administrator with a sterling record, had felt confident all the way.

She left a final meeting elated, with a verbal promise of the job. She was told to expect a phone call the next day morning to discuss start dates.

Overnight, it all went grievously wrong.

A former colleague let slip that Holt suffered from bipolar disorder, a permanent condition also known as manic depression.

It is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and characterised by mood swings; well-known sufferers include film director Francis Ford Coppola and actor Ben Stiller.

In Holt's case, medication controls the condition. Although she does have some side effects, such as a dry mouth and shaking hands, her productivity is not affected and she takes no more sick leave than normal.

"By looking at me and talking to me, you'd never know I have a mental illness," she says.

The expected phone call the next morning started with a question: "Is there something you want to tell me?"

Holt was nonplussed and said "no". The question was repeated, the phrase "mental illness" never uttered. The call ended with the words: "I'm sorry, we can't offer you the job."

Holt says she was "gutted" and two years later, thinking about it still upsets her.

"I was so distraught by it - that had never happened before. I felt like I wasn't of use; I wasn't of worth."

She found out that a colleague of five years' standing, whom she had trusted, had blurted out her secret. Knowing she was the victim of a breach of the Human Rights Act, she contacted a lawyer to take on the two companies. But then she lost the heart to take action.

"I didn't have the confidence. It's just so unfair - there's nothing I can do if people are going to think like this."

Holt, now 30, abandoned IT and started a career in mental health advocacy. But she tells this story under an assumed name; she is unwilling to use her real one outside mental health circles.

In contrast, Treasury data management specialist Rachel Nelson, 30, made the courageous decision to be upfront with her workmates about her illness.

She was diagnosed with clinical depression, which runs in her family, last year after stresses which included a divorce, redundancy and increasing periods of anxiety, lethargy and time off work.

The gregarious Nelson decided that people could not help her if they did not know what was happening. When she got the diagnosis, Nelson told her boss, then made the announcement at a team meeting.

"Their reaction was 'My God, Rachel, really?' Everyone sees me as being so confident and together."

Questions followed: how can we help? "They wanted to know how it happened because they couldn't understand how it had hit me. I said I had a strong family propensity to it. It's chemical."

But difficulties in finding the right medication - one caused insomnia, and a counteracting sleeping pill made her "wildly suicidal" - led to 11 weeks off work.

When the right drug was discovered, "it was as if a switch had been flipped". Nelson returned to work gradually over eight weeks, with her boss helping by dividing tasks into smaller chunks to aid her confidence.

"Imagine trying to keep people in the dark while dealing with it," Nelson muses. "I'd be even more stressed out about having to lie and cover up."

The fear of being found out can cause more stress than the illness itself. It is to make fairness a tenet of New Zealand society, that discrimination against someone on the grounds of disability, which embraces mental illness, is illegal.

"It makes you feel like you're a lower-class citizen, like people are looking down on you," says Holt. "People treat you differently - they think they've got to be careful or tread carefully. Or they think they should be telling you to take your medication.

"I just want to get on with it, like everybody else, because I am like everybody else. I don't choose to have this illness, but I have to deal with it. Why can't other people?"

Mental illness covers a wide range of conditions from depression and anxiety to eating and personality disorders. They may be influenced by biological, environmental, social and psychological factors, and may be temporary or permanent.

Depression is the most common, with 600,000 prescriptions for antidepressants written out every year in New Zealand.

Look around your office. The Mental Health Foundation estimates that one in five people will suffer a mental illness in any given year, so there will be few among your colleagues who have not been touched in some way.

You are unlikely to know unless you are told. But then your affected colleagues are unlikely to tell you, such is the stigma.

And no wonder. Popular representations of mental ill-health focus on violence - think Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho and all it has spawned - and the small number of the seriously unwell who might injure others.

And although public health campaigns such as the award-winning Like Minds, Like Mine was an effective demystifier in its depiction of high achievers, these people tended to be independently employed, and included rugby great John Kirwan (depression) and musician Mike Chunn (agoraphobia). Suit-wearers were absent.

A 40-year-old manufacturing company executive with well-controlled bipolar disorder outlines why he has never said a word at work.

"People think your judgment is impaired. If people even suspected that your judgment could be affected by this, then when you had to make hard judgment calls, it would be a classic thing to throw at you."

Reaction after two workers were diagnosed with bipolar disease proved his point.

"I remember someone who had been on an interview panel saying, 'I wish we had known this when we were hiring this person'."

"What I always say ... is that if someone is sick in any way the firm should offer them support and assistance. If they are too sick to perform the job, then that is a serious problem that has to be worked through."

Nelson's bosses at the Treasury say that backing staff who are ill is not just about the law, or the equal employment opportunities-sensitive State Sector Act to which it is bound.

"To get the best people, you need to draw from the widest range of people," says Angela Hauk-Willis, deputy secretary, corporate branch.

There are "sound business reasons for making sure you can recruit the best and retain the best people, including those with disability. It's cheaper to retain than recruit".

And in a world where workplace stress is widespread, the mentally unwell may even have an advantage: to live well they need to be self-aware and learn how to deal with stress.

One of Nelson's time-out tricks if she starts feeling fragile at work is simply colouring in - she prints out a favourite cartoon and spends five minutes shading it.

"When I get out my crayons, people know I'm not feeling well and to leave me alone. Your entire world and the troubles of your life are boiled down to 'can I keep inside the line?'

"It's really valuable as a distraction because quite often all our upset is stuff we've made up ourselves ...

"If you can take yourself away for a bit you actually manage to calm yourself."

Some of her colleagues, she reckons, must think she has revealed too much. Does she care? "No. Until you put out there what's going on for you, people can't help."

She knew the risks. "I was aware that there's a big stigma out there, but I decided that I was going to ignore that and live as if it didn't exist, and if it did become a problem, deal with it then."

So far, no problem. "Three or four" unwell people at work have confided in Nelson - but not to other workmates because they fear being labelled as crazy or weak.

But informed colleagues are good signposts. "Sometimes you can see they're a bit worried because I'm acting a little odd, and that's cool because I notice ... and I think, what am I doing which doesn't quite jibe here?

"They're a lot more understanding of Rachel needing time off with no explanation at short notice, because I truly need a mental health day."

* A one-day conference titled Mental Health at Work takes place on March 3 in central Auckland. Details from the Mental Health Foundation on (09) 300-1020.

* Next week: Tips on how to prevent stress leading to mental ill-health.

Herald feature: Health