Several weeks ago, SHRM’s CEO, Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., asked his LinkedIn followers whether they had ever changed their mind about someone after developing empathy for them. I responded that as a young child I practically hated my father. To my mind, he was an unpredictable, angry man around whom his family was supposed to walk on eggshells so as not to disturb the peace.
What I didn’t understand until I was in my teens was that my father suffered from bipolar disorder. His erratic behavior frightened me, but as I grew older, I knew how much my father loved me and that he would never hurt me. When I shifted my mindset to being curious about how he experienced the world between manic episodes, I began to empathize with how challenging and frightening it would be to lose my sense of what’s real and what I might be making up in my mind. Those days and hours before the full onset of an episode would have triggered anxiety if they happened to me, which can be its own hell.
I also didn’t understand my mother’s stress from doing her best to make sure my father didn’t upset any of his customers or the management team at his company’s headquarters several states away. I didn’t understand why my mother convinced my father to decline a promotion to senior management at the headquarters office until I realized that she was trying to help him avoid the added stress of a more demanding job plus the added scrutiny of his mental state from the management team in the headquarters office instead of being sheltered from that at the small, satellite office that my father led.
What would my father’s career have been like if instead of fearing getting fired when he felt the onset of mania, he instead felt the safety of a corporate support system to help stabilize him? We’ll never know.
Luckily, I worked for an employer that had such a system in place when I had my own psychotic break with the onset of major depression. It took courage—and a dose of desperation—for me to tap those resources, but they were there for me when I was finally ready to ask for help. Thankfully, I had a supportive manager who helped me get my legs under me when I returned to work. And that’s the key message: employers need to train managers how to help their employees access mental health resources and how to reintegrate them when they return from a leave of absence. That’s good for the employee, good for the team and good for the business.