Ask HN: I was let go for writing about my depression. What should I do?
A couple days after I wrote it, I shared the piece of writing with a couple people on Twitter. I'm going to guess that my boss must have saw it popup on his timeline which led to me getting a phone call from him. We just talked about it and how I was feeling. He told me to take the next day off. I guess he was trying to be nice and be a good person but the day after the day I was given off, I received another phone call from him. He pretty much said, "I don't think it's best if you come into work. If you have anything of ours, just return them when you feel like it." aka we're letting you go. He reassured me it wasn't because of what I wrote over and over again. I, on the other hand, do think I was let go because of what I wrote. I wasn't given an explanation as to why I was being let go. I don't and didn't think of myself as a liability but I guess that's how I was viewed.
I talked to a couple people about it. Some said he was in his right to let me go, others said it wasn't right for me to be let go. I'm currently on a gap year and all I wanted some work to do and hopefully gain experience from. I can't do that and every junior Android developer position I've applied to in Chicago has pretty much turned me down. Chicago doesn't have that much junior Android developer positions compared to other cities. I can't get the experience I wanted and can't earn the money I planned on earning. At this point, I have no idea what to do. I just work on my own small projects day to day. What do you guys think I should do? Do you think my boss was in his right to let me go even though I didn't mention anything about the company in my writing?
Any help would be appreciated.
55 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadI'm always happy to clarify on any part that wasn't clear or you need more information on.
Sign up for Medicaid (http://www.hfs.illinois.gov/medical/apply.html) and/or talk to the the Cook County Health System psychiatry department (http://www.cookcountyhhs.org/tag/psychiatry/)
I’ve read the Bible and Qur’an front to back 5 times each. They hold no meaning to me.
I've run into some hardline Christians and Mormons in the Chicago software scene and writing that could very well have made you stone cold dead to them. Is your old boss from Wheaton, Illinois or nearby? That seems to be their headquarters.
I see a psychiatrist and a therapist twice a week. Obviously they're are cutting into my runway but I figured it's worth it since I've been doing much better ever since I wrote the piece of writing.
I bet you can get a software internship gig near you. Contact professors doing computational work at Notre Dame (http://ibms.nd.edu/clusters/computational-biology-bioinforma...) they may have room in their budget. Though the pay will not be extravagant.
Indeed shows 300+ software gigs in South Bend: http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=software&l=South+Bend%2C+IN
But DELETE THE FUCKING ARTICLE man. Obviously, it isn't helping your cause.
Also definitely sue your former employer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8597953
I'll definitely look into getting an internship gig and probably spend all of tonight and tomorrow applying for the software gigs that I think I'll be a good fit in. Still debating suing.
Keep working on your hobby projects, maybe go enjoy the parks, and maybe see if there are any little webdev jobs or something available on Craigslist in your area. Worst case, see if anyone is hiring waiters.
Don't stop reaching out for help, and try not to spend too much time in your own head. Good luck!
But this advice is easy to give for someone who isn't actually in the situation.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/246397486/The-ADAAA-Congress-Brea...
Major depression, or the perception that someone is depressed, is now considered a disability that the ADA applies to.
If an employer takes a hostile action (denial of promotion, firing, etc.) against someone based on their disability, the victim can sue the employer.
Proving that they fired you because of the article will be an issue, but a skilled disability attorney can probably do that. Presuming that you were otherwise a good employee, it probably won't be too hard to prove that the article was the reason. Talk to a disability attorney, or just contact the EEOC.
http://www.eeoc.gov/employees/charge.cfm
If a workplace terminated an employee due to writings that the employee wrote which alienated the rest of the workplace and made them feel unsafe, wouldn't that be a pretty easy thing to attest in court ,that the termination was not wrongful but rather motivated by trying to keep a friendly work atmosphere and ensure workers' safety?
That seems like the thing to focus in on if one were to be defending against such a case.
Not wanting to work with a depressed person is not a valid termination reason because of the categorization as a disability.
Reading the post in question, I think the addiction issues are another possible cause of the employer's actions.
Addiction can also be considered an actionable disability, but you have to be treating it or otherwise on the wagon to file suit. I don't have a citation to that on hand, but it's out there.
If a person makes a direct threat then yes, obviously the employer can take action to protect their work force.
But why do you think of violence when we're talking about mental illness? The vast majority of violent crime is committed by people who do not have a mental illness.
Your comment is stigmatizing and ignorant. OP is male. You do not seem to be askin about the risk of violence because of his maleness even though most violent crime is commited by men.
About one in six people over 16 have a significant mental health problem. The US has a population of hundreds of million people over sixteen - let's say 250million. That gives about 41 million people with a significant mental illness. Each year about 16,000 people are murdered in US, so even if every single murder was committed by someone with a mental illness you still have 41million (minus 16,000) safe people who have a mental health problem. But research suggests that only about 10% of mirder is committed by someone with a mental illness.
[1] using current UK terminology
I wrote a big, long diatribe about how wrong it was of you to inject a weird sexism-hued gender argument, but I erased it.
I don't believe that asking a question is ever stigmatizing if done in good faith, and my question (which, by the way, is distinct from a comment) is most certainly in good faith. My question may certainly have been ignorant, but the removal of such ignorance is exactly the goal of my question! I ask to become wiser, I promise.
Simply put : I didn't ask about his gender because it wasn't his gender which alienated me towards him. The product of his authorship; the blog post and the details therein, is what alienated me towards him.
The blog post, with what dangerously little knowledge of psychology I have, made me feel as if it were written by a psychopath. I don't care to state specific reasons publicly. Psychopaths have a larger incidence of impulsive/threatening/amoral behaviors by definition than so-called 'normal' behaviors. That's the reason why I feel compelled to think of violence.
My jump towards violence wasn't as vague as 'mentally ill', but rather specifically towards descriptions of activities within that blog post which I categorized mentally as psychopathic.
One assumes that his co-workers were untrained in mental health disciplines, just as I am. I don't think that it is unreasonable to assume that upon reading the post they may have felt the same way as I did.
Let me distill the actual question for you, so that you can answer the right one this time.
The question was : "If an employee sues for wrongful termination after writing a blog post which has the effect of alienating people towards him, wouldn't it be quite easy to have that workforce testify that "X blog post made me feel Y.", and if so doesn't this pose a problem for OP and his plans to sue?"
The assumption that question falls upon is that I'm not the only person who was alienated by the blog post, and I would assume that if the author was actually an acquaintance that the effect would be stronger.
The question was asked as a hypothetical 'what-if' for possible motives behind the termination; a piece of the overall brainstorming session behind OPs lawsuit, and also a chance for me to better understand how laws work regarding such things. Please use a friendlier tone if you'd care to educate others. I feel that your passion for finding fair treatment for the ill is preventing you from reading what I wrote and considering my actual question without turning into a mouthpiece and discarding the question entirely.
Hope you find something better than pills and/or paying a shrink for the rest of your life. I know you can.
Telling a clinically depressed person "buck up, things aren't that bad" is about as helpful as telling somebody with diabetes that "sugar is actually pretty tasty, you should just try it again and see if you like it."
Those pills you so casually dismiss prevented me from taking my own life and have lifted a lifelong fog.
Hope you can find something better to do with your time than writing incredibly ignorant comments on Hacker News. I know you can.
- I would tell someone with type 2 diabetes to stop taking drugs and instead stop eating the carbs (of course the politically correct pharmaceutical / govt response is to take drugs which only treat the symptoms - funny how financial interests work). Again, first hand experience with this.
So no, I would say you can look to either people "having it bad" or "having it good" and finding in both cases they have the power to make choices.
Contact an attorney and follow his/her advice.
Try to take project out of Elance and Odesk and if you think you have real good skills that are not valued in Chicago then move to place where your skill set has value. Valley is extremely good technology cluster but Boston,Austin and Seattle are also not bad.
The flip-side is that business owners can also use this power against you. Be careful what you post on social media, it may come back to get you.
All We(HNers) have, is your side of the story, there is no defense from the company that let you go. There is very little upside to publicly naming the company, unless you do it in legal proceedings.
I'm not sure if its possible, but I'd highly recommend you deleting the comments where you named the company, or delete this post. It does nobody any good, especially you. Think about it, what did you gain from naming them. I was with you until I saw that you named the company. Again it comes off petty and childish.
You seem fairly young, since you mentioned your experience, so remember that professionalism goes a long way, and also that Life is not fair. Sometimes you'll get blamed for something you didn't do, other times you'll be fired for something shitty like this. Your job is to keep moving ahead all the time, and don't go down to the level of jerks and become a jerk yourself. Stand up for yourself, but don't talk behind other people's back. If they wronged you, then confront them, but give them a chance to defend themselves.
Good luck to you.
I do agree with everything you've said though. I now wish I didn't mention the company but I guess it's too late to change that.
EDIT: I emailed hn@ycombinator.com about deleting the comments. Hopefully that helps.
EDIT 2: seems like the comments are gone.
Yeah, for some future employers it may seem unprofessional, but I would not want to work for such employers.
On the contrary, I would recommend to consult a lawyer, sue them, write a blog about your case and a company, start a movement in the interests of depressed programmers and involve tech media in all of that. This will have both positive externalities and benefits for OP: more protection for depresssed programmers, less incentives for unethical companies to behave like that, traffic for the OP new blog and possibly several job opportunities.
OP, I consider naming and shaming unethical companies like this to be a preferred course of action if done strategically.
Yeah, sometimes, when organizations are locked into Nash equilibrium and any individual actor can't change rules of the game, in that case naming and shaming is unproductive.
Firing a person who has written about their depression? No excuse. Don't give them a chanche to protect themselves(WTF?!). Destroy the company. Help others like you.
EDIT OP, I see you deleted the comments with the name of the company. Please don't let it slide. Fight for yourself and for others who are suffering from depression and are being discriminated against.
Meditation has scientifically proven benefits for people affected with depression and anxiety. Please look into it!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/meditation...
I'm not saying he's lying, but assume for a moment that he got caught up in the emotion and felt that was the reason they fired him. What if it wasn't? What if it was something else? You are telling this young man to start a revolution against a company that may have no malice in their intentions. Naming/Shaming companies have real effect. This company doesn't seem like a multi-national huge corporation with deep pockets, atleast from their webpage I didn't gather that they were. Publicly shaming them may do real damage to the company and people that work there. If the person really was discriminated against, then go the legal route, sue them and settle it that way. If he was wronged, then law is on his side. Once you win that lawsuit, then feel free to blog and start a revolution because then you have a guilty party. Right now, its just his word against no one else's word, they can't defend themselves.
But in the original comment you called naming the company "petty and childish" and insinuated that he is is behaving like a "jerk", while saying that posting on HN is "talking behind others back". The gist of your comment was "move forward" and be generous to the company by allowing them "to defend themselves".
And this is what I disagree with.
I would get some legal counsel and aim for some form of severance in combination with continued health benefits (if you had any) rather then lengthy litigation that will only add to your burden.
Good luck on your difficult journey.