Working in the Dark
Posted by JohnD
If you’re dealing with depression and you realize it’s affecting your work, who should you tell? Your employer or supervisor? – or your clients if your self-employed? Why might you need to do that, and how might they react? Would they be understanding and helpful? Or would they no longer trust your abilities because they thought you were “crazy?” And if you tell someone, when should you do it – during a bright spell when your job performance is fine or during a dark time when you need to take a leave of absence? And what exactly should you say?
These are some of the questions that Working in the Dark: Keeping Your Job While Dealing with Depression tries to answer. I wish I had read this book when it came out in 2002. It would have been an important resource in dealing with my own crisis at work. Not that I was looking for such a book at that time. Even though I had been dealing with depression for years, I couldn’t bring myself to make the visceral connection with problems in my work life until the situation blew up in my face. This is a guide to prevent that from happening.
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One of the hardest admissions I have had to make about the effect of depression was to say bluntly to myself, after years of denial, that my performance in my profession had steadily deteriorated under the impact of this illness. The truth had been obvious for some time to colleagues depending on me to be a consistently outstanding performer, but it only came home when facts kicked me in the teeth. The experience was a bit like what alcoholics describe as hitting rock bottom.
I was in danger of losing not just a job but a professional practice that I had built over years whether self-employed or working through an organization. Clients were unhappy, I was taken off assignments after fogging through meetings under deep depression, and I was not carrying my weight with colleagues in bringing in new work. That was hardly surprising since my basic will to act so often disappeared. The director who had hired me was deeply disappointed and angry at this mediocre performance. I, who had done so much in the past and come in the door with such great promise, was not measuring up, pure and simple.
