Stigma and the Time I Didn’t Get a Job
What’s the deal with the mental health taboo in 2020?
Mental health, for whatever reason, has always been a taboo subject. It’s getting easier to talk about now but there is still a stigma surrounding it. We keep it very private, like it’s a secret. God forbid someone knows we are feeling worthless or helpless.
I have always been very open about my mental health and mental illness because I think if more people talk about their own experiences maybe the stigma will deteriorate. If we normalize the conversation then maybe more people will see that mental health is just as important as physical health.
I’m very honest about my experiences when people ask me questions. I’ve been very vocal in the past (maybe too vocal on Facebook) about the importance of awareness. Heck, I wrote part of my senior collection of poetry for my undergraduate degree about mental health.
But I am an outlier. Not everyone is as accepting and open and conversational as I am. I am an advocate for myself because I feel that I have to be. I don’t want other people to feel that way, so I am an advocate for them too. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t sting when something crappy happens, though.
Discrimination is objectively wrong. When I hear that word, my immediate thought goes to race, ethnicity, or gender. Not so much mental health. Unfortunately it happens every day and for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes discrimination can be subtle, and in my story I’m sure it was subconscious.
I want to start out by saying that I will not mention the company I was applying to work for. I don’t want to shine poor light on them because I strongly support what they do. Their name is not relevant to my story and I wouldn’t dream of speaking poorly of them regardless of what happened. I am only speaking on this one encounter.
I lost my job in March of 2018 due to being unable to continue working, as I was admitted to a psychiatric facility. I spent eight days inpatient and spent six weeks completing an intensive partial hospitalization program. I honestly don’t blame them for replacing me. The work needed doing and I wasn’t there to do it.
I started applying to other positions within my company as well as other places. I had the chance to interview for a higher up position within my original company. I was so excited. It was more responsibility, more creative liberty, and more pay.
It was a working interview, so when I arrived on the morning of my interview the director showed me around and explained what it is that I was to do that morning, and I thought I did a really great job. Obviously I’m a little biased, but still. I accomplished more than what was asked of me and I got on well with the other employees.
After about an hour of this working interview, the director called me into his office for a more traditional one-on-one talk. He asked me normal interview questions like “What are your qualifications?,” “How would you handle this situation?,” “Where do you see yourself in five years?,” etc.
Then he asked “Why did you have to leave your previous position?” Which is a perfectly valid and normal question for an interview. As I didn’t think it was his business, I tried to skirt around it and said “I was in the hospital but everything is fine now.” I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to be too revealing either.
He kept pressing to know what I was in for. Surgery? Treatment? I was gone for seven weeks; I must not healthy. I tried to explain in as few words as possible that I had not been okay but I was now and it would not interfere with any future I had with this company; that I had been struggling but I was in recovery and working through it on my own.
Then he asked me a question I never thought a professional would ask. “How can I trust that you won’t end up in the hospital again?” I was dumbfounded. I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped. I had just finished saying I was dedicated to the company and my personal health and life was completely separate.
I did something really dumb next. I was thoughtless and naive. I fired back and told him I had been to a psychiatric ward but it was over and I was on new medication that would help prevent the kind of issues I was having before. I wanted the job so badly that I gave too much and revealed too much.
I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t get the job.
None of that was anyone’s business but my own. I know now that I shouldn’t have said it and that it was an inappropriate question. Hindsight is always 20/20. But 21 year old Megan didn’t know any better and wanted to get a really cool job.
I don’t know if I didn’t get that position because of my depression and hospital stay. I can’t say because only he knows why he didn’t give me the job. But I know it certainly didn’t help.
He said he would call me by the following Monday with a yes or no, but I never heard from him. I called the office and left a few messages but it was an additional week before the director called me to say he hired someone else. I remember asking him on the phone why I didn’t get the position and what I can do better next time I go to an interview (a tactic my dad taught me to get as much insight as possible) and he beat around the bush saying something about availability and that he had another call to make.
I’m sure there were a lot of factors that went into his decision; I still had a semester left of school, I was young, maybe even more. And I can’t help but wonder if my illness had something to do with it.
