Disclosing or hiding my mental health condition has always been difficult to navigate especially in the workplace. A skill I’ve learned for my personal life but also for my working life has been developing a mental health elevator pitch. With life experiences involving mental health I’ve usually wanted to construct a story to hide the mental health condition.
It’s not that I’m afraid of people knowing about my mental health experiences, because I’m comfortable with having this condition. As a writer I’m fairly transparent but in my day to day life I’m usually under the radar. It’s more so that I know as soon as I tell people about the condition many people almost immediately discriminate against me. This comes out in subtle forms of talking strangely to me, people making assumptions about me that don’t make sense, some people just avoid me, some people are afraid of me, some people just become overly awkward in general, and others have stopped talking to me. These are all specific instances I’m thinking of which have happened multiple times when I’ve told people I’ve had schizophrenia.
Five months after my second episode of psychosis, I was hired without divulging my diagnosis or being asked any questions about it. I worked at K-Mart in the lawn and garden department. Retail is a very social profession and on most days there is usually time for conversations with coworkers. When I became better acquainted with my coworkers they asked more about what I had been up to in the past few months. Questions about where I had worked previously and about what I had been doing were normal to ask and also fairly benevolent. When first asked these questions I felt alarmed and I was afraid to answer. The fact is that I didn’t have an answer for them.
The first thoughts that came to mind were that about eight months back I was in an episode of psychosis where I thought I was a messiah who was going to save the world while only sleeping three to four hours per night and I was eventually hospitalized. Following a nine day hospital stay, I had spent about five months in a severe depression living in my parents house, mostly watching tv and recovering from what I had been through. When these thoughts flooded my mind my emotions spiked and I panicked. I felt put on the spot and these were difficult questions to answer. A couple times I just gave really short answers of having gone to college recently. Most people knew I was being short and didn’t have too many follow up questions.
Being asked these questions eventually lead to me comprising a story that I had been to school, I took some time off, and now I was getting back into the workforce. Fortunately, it was 2008 and there was a major economic recession which provided good reason for me to have not worked or found a job yet since I had graduated.
So in constructing stories for the work place, I’ve realized that the stories need to be based off fact and that I don’t want to lie and that I don’t have to either. The first step is to establish the things I’m willing to mention and also the things that I don’t want anyone knowing. So in constructing this story the things I wanted people to know were that I went to college, I had some time off in between, and that my reason for working was getting back into the workforce. These are also things that are fairly unavoidable to mention.
Looking at this story, it’s a quick snapshot of about eight months worth of living. The strongpoints of the story are having gone to college and looking to reenter the work force. The weak point of the story or the part that raises questions, was having spent about eight months without work. This was the part that got questioned by a lot of people. Being in a process of having information drawn out felt scary, as I didn’t want people to know about my mental health condition or my episode. It took time and practice to get comfortable in situations where people wanted to know more about me. And again the questions weren’t prying or disparaging, they were just natural curiosities people had because we were coworkers and many people were just wanting to talk.
When responding to questions that tap into my vulnerabilities it’s been important for me to have a sense of what information does or doesn’t answer the question. Some things were important to mention whereas there were others I didn’t want to share and that I didn’t have to either. The things I didn’t want people knowing about were having a mental health condition, my episode of psychosis, the hospitalization, and the time I spent recovering from psychosis to get to a point where I could work.
Knowing this in advance helped me to talk around these major life events when being asked questions about myself. Having a clear vision of the things I do and don’t want to mention has made it much easier to say the things I’m wanting to. When asked about what I had been doing the past year, I figured out that I can just talk generally in saying I had been looking for work, I’d been taking some time off to relax, and I was spending time golfing which were all things that were true. There are usually common answers you can use to respond to questions that move the conversation in a positive direction. Part of these responses is answering the question and moving the conversation forward which is many times all people are really looking for.
At the time my mental health events were the obvious reasons why I hadn’t worked, however, they are not events anyone would ever assume had happened to someone who had been unemployed for a year. I used to worry people would immediately assume I had a mental health condition if I hadn’t worked for a year or if I had difficulty answering questions, however, I’ve come to realize there’s no logical rationale someone could comprise that connects a year of unemployment to an episode of psychosis and psychiatric hospitalization.
Also, my psychiatric condition is not imaginable to most people. Internally I have a vivid context for what’s happening when I’m experiencing symptoms however, none of this really shows externally. I thought for some reason people could see my psychosis in the way I interacted with them or they somehow had a way of knowing I had psychosis, and that it was visible in my being.
Over the years I’ve realized this is not the case. People might see that I’m awkward at times or I stand really still or there are small things that are different for me than they are with others but that doesn’t give any indication of having had a psychiatric condition. With this being said, after I paused or didn’t know how to answer the question of ‘what have you been up to?’, many people made benevolent comments. Some people mentioned that it’s been a tough job economy and everyone’s having trouble finding work. Other people mentioned it’s good you found this job and you’re in the workforce.
In retrospect, people probably knew there was some reason that I hadn’t worked for about a year. It seems like the obvious deduction to make. However, they weren’t aware of my mental health condition and none of what I said would make them so. I didn’t wind up losing any friends in the workplace either. Rather, there were a few times where coworkers asked me to get drinks with them after work. So the story didn’t have to be perfect, it really just had to move the conversation along. I made a lot of mistakes when sharing my mental health elevator pitch and I still do.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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