#googleeffect: mental health and employment prospects

In response to today's #googleeffect discussion on Twitter, sparked by this blog post by Erica Crompton on the Rethink Mental Illness site re: how being open about one's mental health may have an adverse effect on employment prospects.

I studied languages as an undergraduate, and as my year abroad approached, I applied for the popular British Council Assistantship scheme along with the majority of my peers. The scheme is the preferred option for the year abroad amongst language students the length and breadth of the UK and has an acceptance rate of something in the region of 97%. Being the young, naïve bug that I was, I declared my mental health history to date in the relevant box of the application form, attached the requisite medical documentation and sent it off. I then got on with what any self-respecting Francophile would do, namely lounging around in cafes smoking Gitanes, and daydreaming about the soon-to-be-realised prospect of lounging around in cafes smoking Gitanes in my adopted country, prefarably whilst being propped up by wistful wisps of men named Jean-François.

A short while later I received a lengthy email from the admissions team which I have abridged for your perusal below:

...as your application stands at the moment, there is a serious question mark as to whether the French authorities will accept it. The fact that a candidate suffers from or has suffered from drug overdose, anxiety and depression is something which any school employing a language assistant will require clear information about before they consider making an offer of appointment as all language assistants are in charge of classes of young people.

We will need a full report from the psychiatrist who treated you (giving the cause and history of the depression, and including details of the drug overdose), as we feel this will clarify the situation from the French authorities. Without this report, we cannot be sure they will accept your application.

I would very much appreciate it if you could ensure that the psychiatrist’s report reaches us no later than 31^st March. You must be prepared to meet any charges this report may incur yourself, since I am afraid the British Council does not have any funds for this.

You can probably guess what the outcome of the tedious exchange that followed was. Needless to say, I was indeed deemed a risk to myself and others, and the French authorities did not see fit to accept my application. Incidentally, I've since tutored French to young people with learning difficulties, become an ESOL mentor to a refugee and her child, and currently work as a bilingual nanny, the proceeds of which are funding my training to teach English as a Foreign Language. To the best of my knowledge, I've yet to scar a pupil of any age too deeply, although I am teaching the Five Kinds of Conditional this week, so I'll keep you posted. As for my year-abroad adventures, I managed to find a French university that would have me and, amongst other things, signed up for every theatre course going and found myself part of a trilingual troupe performing in France and Germany. To those who are as concerned as I was with the pressing effect of my rejection on my and Jean-François' nascent love affair, I can also safely report that I didn't do too poorly in this regard either. Not bad for a year's work.

The effect that the exchange with the BC did have, however, was to drive me deeper than ever into the MH closet. It confirmed my suspicions that being honest about my health would lead to being viewed with suspicion (what I like to call the susp-vicious cycle, ho ho ho). It also played a part in ensuring that I continued with the TRH approach (Trying Really Hard Not To Be Crazy, see down-blog), which, as anyone who has attempted it knows, does not have a tendency to end well.

It is my belief that until we reach a point where mental health issues such as mine and the thousands of others in similar situations are understood as what they are: chronic, manageable conditions, we will not see and end to the attitudes displayed in the correspondence I received above. The fact is that, whilst we must applaud the much freer and more open discussion of mental health over the last 20 years, there still exists a great deal of fear and ignorance around what certain conditions really entail. The words 'bipolar' and 'psychotic', for example, are often used to dismiss a person's behaviour, to set them outside the acceptable norm and label them as weird, or scary. As soon as we do this, as soon as we allow ourselves to give a knee-jerk reaction to a convenient buzz-word, we are essentially giving the OK not just to rejecting a person but to making them the subject of derision and, often, of ridicule. Scratch the surface of the email above, and it's not hard to fish out a couple choice examples: equating a suicide attempt to a “drug overdose” is poorly worded at best; however, implying that depression and anxiety could lead to my causing harm to my students is woefully ignorant. Similarly, the idea that all depression is subject to the laws of cause and effect, rather than being simply a state in which one exists for variable periods of time, betrays a lack of common understanding of a condition affecting a sizeable percentage of the population.

Given these attitudes, it comes as no surprise that many people choose, like me, to blog anonymously. To those who waive their anonymity, I salute you, and I hope that in the not-too-distant future there will be no need for any of us to fear the stigma to which open discussion of our conditions might give rise.