Ruby Wax is right about concealing mental illness

Ruby Wax has been a prominent campaigner for mental health awareness. As a fellow sufferer, I greatly appreciate that and I respect her for coming out. It’s not easy. But in an interview with the Times she is quoted as saying, “When people say, ‘Should you tell them at work?’, I say: ‘Are you crazy?’ You have to lie. If you have someone who is physically ill, they can’t fire you. They can’t fire you for mental health problems but they’ll say it’s for another reason. Just say you have emphysema.” She has received much criticism, not least from the chattering classes in the Guardian (of which I am a continuing non chattering class reader, by the way), who say, as freelance journalist Eleanor Morgan did today, “What Wax has said is backwards-looking, pessimistic and dangerous.” Is it really? I’m not so sure about that.

For once, I do not accept the black and white argument. Wax says you should under no circumstances tell your employer. Well, that depends which employer you are talking about. I spent my entire working life in the Civil Service and came across good and bad managers. There were some I could speak to openly about my own issues with depression and anxiety, but there were some to whom I didn’t dare say a word. All managers are not the same. I had 20 years of generally good managers but just as long with very bad ones. It was the luck of the draw, really, who ended up managing you. When I left the Civil Service, I bummed around with a couple of employers, one of which was Tesco. Whilst I was with them, I had a severe depressive episode. I told my manager who was, on the face of it, sympathetic, but other managers were anything but sympathetic. One junior manager told me if I didn’t like it with them, I could leave. “It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “You can leave now.” Now he must have known the state I was in. I rarely give in to depression, although sometimes you just have to. I had explained all this to another manager but her attitude dripped of contempt. I’ve long got over Tesco and their jumped-up little Hitler junior managers, but when I read Ruby Wax’s comments, and the venom they attracted, I thought immediately she had a point.

Wax inferred that you could be sacked from a job if you had a mental illness, but not if you had a physical one. Morgan countered that the Equality Act meant that you could not be sacked because of a mental problem, but she misses the point. You certainly can be fired if you have a mental problem because many employers have draconian policies regarding sick leave. Morgan says that “an employer should not treat you unfavourably because of a disability, and must make “reasonable adjustments to work practices, and provide other aids and adaptations” – for example, being flexible about hours, and temporarily allowing you to work part-time, or have a period of sick leave with the clear reassurance that you are still valued as an employee.” These are the words of a freelance journalist and author who has not seen the inside of a manager’s office when you are being warned about the implications of future sick leave with threats of dismissal. And these were not empty threats.

The real world is a world where, if someone told a particular employer they suffered from a mental illness, alarm bells start to ring. “Oh my god: what have I got here? Some kind of nutter?” You get moved to somewhere you don’t want to go, pressure is put on you. “We have targets, you know. This is Darwinism where only the fittest survive.”

I’d love to know where Morgan gets her information from. “Attitudes are improving,” she says. “There is tangible optimism, even within a sector of the NHS that has come apart at the seams under public spending cuts, that people are more open about how they feel in their heads”. She lives in a parallel world from me, then, because my experience is that people are less open than ever before. People talk to me, write to me, about the weather in their heads because they have seen me attempting to tackle my own demons and some have said that they too have suffered over the years, usually in silence. Not just silently at work, but at home too. It is no good Morgan saying that we should all be more open about our mental illness, because not everyone is going to react in what we would regard as a positive way. For every good civil service manager, there will be a bad one. For every bad Tesco manager, you would think there would be a good one, although I was never lucky enough to find one. My experience is that caring for staff is an empty slogan that belongs on a power-point presentation, somewhere after making you work as hard as you can for as little as we can get away with paying you.

More people are seeking mental health treatment than ever before and guess what? The government has slashed spending on mental health since it came to power. That tells you something about government priorities, doesn’t it? And if government priorities do not include mental health, where is the evidence that attitudes are improving? Answer: there isn’t any.

Morgan concludes: “In discouraging people from telling employers they’re unwell – because that’s what depression or anxiety is, a blip in our overall health – Wax is feeding the very stigma she’s warning against.” No, she isn’t, actually. She’s dealing with the world as it is, not the world as it is or how we would want it to be. It is not feeding the stigma because the stigma is already immense. I would argue that in many instances, employee honesty with an uncaring Tesco-like employer, would cause the sufferer even more problems. It did me.

Best of all, Morgan says, “Tell your boss if you’re struggling. Ask for time off.” Now pardon me, but it just doesn’t work like that. The response is far more likely to be, “Pull yourself together!” Most managers are preoccupied with “the business”, not some weakling’s state of mind. “You can have a day off next Monday week. It will be from your annual leave allocation, of course, but not before then. Now run along and do your work.”

This is not a shop floor of equality. In these de-unionised days, the bosses can do and say what they like and the depressed employee can go and look for something else. That’s what happened to me at a store which collects from us one in every eight pounds we in Britain spend. If they can act like that, why should anyone else be any different?

I can speak out because I’m too far down the line to care. If my depression prevents me getting another job, then so be it. But then, that’s another issue. Try telling a prospective employer you suffer from severe clinical depression and four types of anxiety and then tell me their next question is, “When can you start?”

There’s a stigma all right. And Ruby Wax is not feeding it, she’s merely being honest and I respect her for that far more than I do a journalist who believes in a world where the mentally ill are equal and treated with respect; a world that I believe does not exist.