At the beginning of this year, I experienced the onset of a severe mental illness – Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Type. I entered a manic/psychotic episode that impacted all facets of my life, including my work life. This resulted in me being fired, and almost losing everything.
It all started last December, with me starting to experience strange beliefs and hyperactivity. During this time, I had just lost my health insurance through my parents and had to start the process with my workplace. I completed all of the paperwork, but the health insurance didn’t go through. I followed up with the HR department on this 3 times, but received no follow ups and ended up having no insurance for the month of December. Throughout all of this, my family had been encouraging me to go in for help. However, since I had no insurance, I thought I couldn’t go to the doctor (I’m only 23, knew nothing about the healthcare system). I then spent 2 weeks off of work for the holidays, and it only made things worse.
This culminated in me entering a manic/psychotic episode when I returned to work in January, with me believing that the health insurance problem was a plot set up by HR to get me to quit. The first thing I did after returning to work was having a heated conversation with the HR person, saying I was trying to get medical help during the time and I was extremely disappointed. She argued back and it just kind of escalated from there. I started bringing in random topics that had nothing to do with our current situation, and was clearly exhibiting symptoms of being unwell. I ended up demanding a pay increase in this same conversation, and I’m sure they were very confused on what was going on.
Keep in mind, before all of this, I was a well-performing, highly respected Project Manager. I worked at a level higher than my experience level, and had good working relationships with all of our clients. I was not understanding how strange my behavior was at the time.
It only got worse over the next couple weeks, I started developing even more delusions. I thought that the Vice Presidents & CEO of my company were building a house next door to me to spy on me full time, I was hallucinating people from work in cars driving outside my house which also played into the spying delusion, and I thought everyone at work was setting me up for legal trouble. This led to me acting very strangely at work, and telling coworkers very strange beliefs such as people coming after me, people taking credit for my work accomplishments, etc.
I believe the last straw for my firing was changing a due date for client submissions. I received an email from a coworker who I thought was setting me up that the due date was one date, but I made the due date earlier because I thought she was lying. The next day, I was fired due to “continuously causing commotion/trouble in the workplace”, all the while I thought I was proving everyone to be spying and lying about me. From what I understood from the meeting, they thought I was on drugs.
There was only one attempt to reach out to me to see what was going on – and it did not even address what was happening. The person I spoke with only asked about possible events in my life that could be causing my behavior, not getting to the point of identifying I had broken from reality.
There needs to be more protections in place for situations like this – in a time where you are the most vulnerable and need health insurance & job protections the most, you should not be able to be left to get to your worst. I thankfully am now working at a direct competitor of my former company, and will soon be sharing the story of my firing on LinkedIn to spread awareness about first episode psychosis. I am also working with a mental health advocacy group and a state representative to draft legislation for protections for these situautions. Companies should not be able to get away with taking away your livelihood due to circumstances well outside of your control. While mental health is still a very stigmatized topic, we can’t let ableism and a lack of education prevent people from getting the protections they need.