About This Project

Deciding whether to disclose a mental illness (MI) at work may have a impact on one's quality of life. Those with a mental illness are simultaneously encouraged and discouraged from disclosing due to competing factors such as discrimination and accommodation-seeking. We hope to better understand how people with MI think about disclosing in order to ensure that disclosure-decisions are more fully informed and supported in the workplace.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Disclosing a mental illness is unlike disclosing other stigmatized identities. For instance, one might be encouraged to disclose because they may be seeking some accommodations from their workplace. At the same time, fears about discrimination simultaneously discourage disclosure. Previous research has examined disclosure generally, but has failed to investigate how people think about these competing factors as they are trying to come to a decision. The outcome of a disclosure event might heavily impact how one thinks about it after-the-fact. This oversight leaves us under-informed about the precise impact of relevant factors on disclosure-decisions.

What is the significance of this project?

Every person who can and wants to work deserves an opportunity to do so. Failure to support individuals with mental illness in the workplace may lead to poorer performance (thus impacting their financial resources, quality of life and self-esteem) or may discourage job-seeking in the first place. The World Health Organization (2018) has estimated that depression and anxiety alone likely account for US$1 Trillion is losses to the global economy annually. If we can better understand how people with mental illness think about disclosure-decisions, we can better educate employers on best-practices to support individuals with mental illness.

What are the goals of the project?

This project intends to survey individuals who have a mental illness and have not disclosed it to their employers. We will use this information to model how each factor (such as distress or social support) impacts motivation overall. Once we identify all relevant factors (and their impacts) we will be better positions to describe to employers how they might best support their employees. For instance, we might discover that social support is vitally important to decreasing distress and, therefore, makes disclosure unnecessary. That might suggest that employers could support their employees better by increasing opportunities for socialization through shared breaks or consistent schedules.