HR and Employment Law News
Category
Topic
Free Special Reports
Get Your FREE HR Management Special Report. Download Any One Of These FREE Special Reports, Instantly!
Featured Special Report
Claim Your Free Copy of
Top 10 Best Practices in HR Management
HR professionals have the opportunity to play a more strategic role in the business by keeping up to date with the latest HR innovations--technological, legal, and otherwise. This special report will discuss how HR managers can anticipate and address some of the most challenging HR issues this year.
Topics in this special report include:
- Healthcare in 2012
- FMLA Paid Leave Initiatives
- Ethics
- Social Media
- Environmental Responsibility
- Workplace Wellness
- Classifying Employees
- Retirement of Baby Boomers
- Identity Theft
- Communications
Make sure you have the information you need to know about these current HR challenges and how to most effectively manage them in your workplace.
Download Now!
July 17, 2001
Accommodating Mental Illness
A cFor a Limited Time receive a
FREE HR Report "Top 10 Best Practices in HR Management." This comprehensive special report will give you the information you need to know about these current HR challenges and how to most effectively manage them in your workplace.
Download Now
Among the illnesses involved: schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder that can include symptoms such as delusions, hearing voices and difficulty focusing; and bipolar (or manic-depressive) disorder, which is characterized by periods of mania as well as episodes of depression.
Powerful new antipsychotic medications don't produce the muscle stiffness, shuffling gait and involuntary movements associated with earlier drugs. Thanks to them and other factors, many mental-health professionals now urge patients to get back to work as soon as possible - a departure from longstanding views that holding a job might be too stressful.
But that puts new pressures on employers, who may be required to provide special accommodations, like allowing an employee time off to see a doctor, or providing a private space to rest.
Simultaneously, the individual's privacy must be preserved.
Another complication: the employer's legal liabilities are murky. And there are the lingering fears that mentally ill people will be unreliable or, worse, violent.
The Journal notes that workers have always struggled, if quietly, with mild forms of depression and anxiety, but medications such as Prozac and Zoloft as well as company mental-health benefits have enabled them to better manage - even conceal - their diseases on the job.
Yet the five million to six million people with the more serious psychiatric illnesses in the U.S. have faced the greatest obstacles to working and, as a result, suffered sky-high unemployment rates.
There is a payoff, though, for companies that do hire and retain employees with serious mental disorders. Many workers with such illnesses have shown the strength to overcome great barriers and go far in their careers.
A study of 59 professionals and semiprofessionals with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder by Boston University researchers shows that about 60 percent of those surveyed have graduate degrees or have done some graduate work.
In some states, doctors and lawyers are asked to disclose mental illnesses during the licensing process. By and large, however, employers can't ask applicants if they have a psychiatric disability, and those seeking or holding jobs aren't required to disclose one.
"There should be no [legal] way for an employer to obtain the insurance history or medical history of an applicant or new employee," Claudia Center, an attorney at the Employment Law Center in San Francisco, told the Journal.
When a serious mental illness is disclosed, the Americans With Disabilities Act can protect employees with physical or mental disabilities against discrimination and requires that employers provide reasonable accommodations. Employers must also keep such disclosures confidential externally. But deciding who needs to know within the company is largely a matter of company policy, says Bruce Flynn, a senior consultant at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a human-resources consulting firm.
Center warned: "There are certain legal rights you get if you disclose, but suddenly people will know something very personal about you, they might look at you differently, there may be discrimination."
To view the Wall Street Journal story, click here.