I applaud the author for destigmatizing mental health issues. More companies need to be like this. Its really hard for people to understand mental health issues because you have to take many optional classes to even get an idea of what they are. Also, many people throw around terms like psychopath / ADD(ADHD) and either diagnose themselves or others and that can lead to more stigma or even misunderstandings. I think better education of mental health would help solve this.
I suffer with OCD - and I mostly let it go when people say "I'm so OCD" about needing something organized, or wanting something cleaned, etc.
But I do try and educate others on what OCD actually does to people like myself when the opportunity presents itself as it's definitely one of the most misunderstood disorders. It can easily ruin a day/week for me if I let the intrusive thoughts take over.
Anyone interested, take a read through the "symptoms" here:
I just want to highlight one line from that article that is easy to overlook:
> People with OCD understand that their notions do not correspond with reality
It's like having two thought processes running simultaneously - there's one set that is exactly how I was pre-OCD, and there's another that is _constantly_ trying to inject the various obsessions and compulsions. It's really disconcerting to have thoughts that don't really feel like your own thoughts, recognise them as dumb and irrational, yet end up acting on them anyway.
> Also, many people throw around terms like psychopath / ADD(ADHD)
I can't stand this because I suffer from a double whammy: true diagnosed comorbid ADHD and OCD which people assume means that I'm just really hyper and picky. Also, people nowadays tend to assume that I was self-diagnosed (I wasn't) which I find to be a rather disrespectful and demeaning assumption.
Living with ADHD and OCD as a computer programmer is a daily struggle. I have to constantly stop myself from getting hyper-focused on problems unrelated to my job and stop myself from needlessly spending hours getting meaningless details just right. These distractions negatively impact my productivity, so I'm thankful everyday that I've accumulated enough smarts over the years to make up for it with what I produce.
It sucks having to fight yourself everyday in order to live some semblance of a normal life and it really sucks when people minimize your problems by adopting them as monikers for quirky personality traits.
> Living with ADHD and OCD as a computer programmer is a daily struggle.
I've struggled with this for as long as I remember, but I didn't really understand what was wrong with me until I was diagnosed a couple of years ago after having a particularly difficult time.
I was as open with my manager about it as I felt I could be, and they gave the impression of being supportive. When I got a new manager, I laid it all out (which my therapist encouraged me to do), and explained how I was trying new medications and that some of them had negatively affected me. He said he understood and that he'd make sure I got the support I needed. When review time came, he said things hadn't been perfect, but he considered that to be because I hadn't received the appropriate support from my previous manager. Things improved: he made sure I was assigned longer-term work that didn't involve having to switch between tasks too often. Unfortunately, everything I'd done suddenly became irrelevant when they decided to reboot a project, invalidating nine months of work.
Then one day, out of the blue, just as I was getting into the restarted project, I was called into a Hangout and told that that would be my last day, with no formal explanation given, other than that they were suddenly no longer happy with the quality of my work. I was devastated. My son had just started at a private school (because of his own problems with ADHD), and I was due to lease a new car later that day. We ended up homeschooling him for the rest of the year.
What really gets to me, though, is that there was no process. The VP of People had given a talk not longer before about "How to get fired from <company>", and one of the key takeaways was that no one should be fired without knowing it was coming, but for some reason I was treated differently. And all this from a company that preaches "love" as a core value. I'm not naive: I understand that it's all about the bottom line, not caring about people, but this was a company that wanted us to believe it cared about things like mental health.
I've learned my lesson, though. In future, I'll keep personal things to myself, and just try to do my best. I've learned not to think of colleagues as friends, and I will never again fill out a self-assessment except in the blandest, most generic of terms.
