Corporate Environments Need To Start Handling Chronic Illness & Disability Properly

My clients deserve better than to be treated like a liability or blabbermouth for simply making their needs known.

Ahh, American corporate culture. Where years of loyalty don’t make up for a single conversation about your very real medical & mental health needs. Where everyone is lazy until proven productive. Where even understanding, intelligent people turn to cold walls when representing an institution. I had two separate clients with 2 very separate issues get reprimanded in the same week for simply making their needs known when it comes to mental & physical conditions. Obviously I’m not giving you any details that may identify my clients, I’m just gonna say said accommodations were not a big ask at all and would have been very easy for said companies to pull off. But no, instead they were chastised for even speaking up.

As more people become disabled due being unable to retire at 65, the increasing inaccessibility of healthcare or the reality that covid can have permanent mental and physical effects, more workers will need to be accommodated in various ways. Reasonable accommodations should be a given for these employees, but in reality they’re just not. In fact, we have this subconscious idea that disability connotes weakness or laziness in and of itself. (By the way, if my writing is stiff today it’s because I’m experiencing a flareup myself! A covid infection made my dormant Epstein-Barr (mono) somewhat chronic. I’m still waiting to find out if the amount of times it’s flared up constitutes chronic EBV because that has prognostic implications. TMI? Well, too bad! I work for myself and you’re not HR!)

It’s hard to ensure my clients thrive when the corporate world isn’t set up for them to do so and their healthcare itself is tied to these corporations. Insurance companies give doctors so many hoops to jump through just to help- if they’re not already burnt out from trying to in the past. Being your own advocate as a patient and worker is exhausting and often beyond a normal person’s capabilities, let alone someone experiencing a scary new illness or form of neurodivergence (or scary new facet of an existing one.)

I don’t give advice, I don’t tell my clients what to do, I just ask questions until my clients come to their own conclusions. Unfortunately said conclusions sometimes mean leaving the security of corporate for somewhere or something that will accommodate their needs, even when those needs are minor or temporary! (Many of said clients have thriving social lives in which their friends and even strangers usually accommodate them much more easily if not fully, by the way. I know that’s not true for everyone, but it really highlights the worst of the problem.) This conclusion never comes lightly and without question from myself and others around them, but it comes when people exhaust all avenues to make it work at their jobs.

The refusal of most corporate environments to budge can lead to losing their best, most creative, most skilled employees. They don’t seem to care. But when certain bubbles burst (real estate when it comes to ‘back to the office’ initiatives, AI as job replacement, etc.) they will. There will be a reckoning. I just had to vent because it cannot come soon enough.

I didn’t edit this because I need a nap.