Work and Living with a Mental Health Disability

Originally published on mentalhealthathome.org; republished here with permission. Get your blog featured!

“So, what do you do for work?” That’s a pretty standard, run of the mill question if you’re meeting someone for the first time, and one of the reasons why I dislike being around people.

In our society, adults are expected to work, and if you don’t, that is considered unusual unless you fall into a certain pre-determined category, like stay-at-home mom.

Disability, whether it’s due to mental or physical illness, can have a huge impact on the ability to work. In theory, employers are required to make any reasonable accommodations to allow disabled people to function in the workplace, but this can be rather dodgy in practice. Government supports for people with disabilities may be few and far between, hard to qualify for, or limited in the amount of support they provide (or all of the above, really).

Mental illness is also not typically the first thing that comes to mind when the average person thinks about what it means to live with a disability.

It is much harder to objectively “prove” the impact of mental illness, and employers and disability insurers alike seem reluctant to believe what they can’t actually see.

Most of my career I worked full-time. That came to a screeching half three years ago when I quit my job due to workplace bullying. Due to repercussions from the bullying, it took me 9 months to find another job, and by that point, the depression had firmly taken hold. Ever since then I haven’t been able to work very much.

My control over my depression is very tenuous, and it takes very little in the way of situational stressors to trigger a substantial worsening of my symptoms.

It’s worked out well that both my jobs are casual, in the sense that I only work when I choose to accept shifts. However, financially this isn’t ideal. I typically don’t earn enough to cover my expenses each month. I’m not paying into a pension plan aside from a little bit into the government plan all workers are required to pay into.

In Canada, where I am, there’s a bit of a hodgepodge of disability benefits. To qualify for my province’s disability plan I would have to exhaust my savings first. The federal disability plan, which is administered as part of the Canada Pension Plan, is harder to qualify for if you’ve got a mental rather than physical disability. There’s also a federal disability tax credit, which doesn’t really matter that much since my income’s so low I’m hardly paying any tax anyway. However, qualifying for the disability tax credit allows a person to start up a registered disability savings plan, and the government will kick in a certain amount as a grant-based on how much you contribute, up to a certain maximum.

I used to think that my mental illness would go into remission again at some point and I’d be able to get back to working full-time, or at least a regular part-time position.

Now that’s looking more and more unlikely, which means I have to start thinking more seriously about other options. I’m very lucky that I’ve got savings so there isn’t a huge sense of urgency around all of this, but it’s still something I do need to figure out. I think at some point in the next year or two I’ll apply for the disability tax credit in hopes of getting some free money from the government through the disability savings plan. I’m hoping that my doctor will have seen me impaired enough for long enough to make a good case for me on the application. Still, I’m not entirely convinced that the government decision-making people will decide in my favour.

I think I’ve mostly come to terms that I’m never going to be able to work much.

What’s harder to wrap my head around, though,  is the uncertainty around income. And being single, I don’t have a partner that I can lean on. Most of the time I don’t spend too much time worrying about it, but it is something that fairly regularly pops up in my nightly 2-minute freak-out that I have before going to bed.

After my first episode of depression 12 years ago, I never would have guessed that this is the position in which I would end up.

Even though I accept the change, there’s a sense of loss at not being able to do much of the work that I used to enjoy so much.

But I suppose it’s often the case that life throws you curveballs, and you’ve just got to go with it. When life hands you lemons, make some lemon-infused water.

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Ashley Peterson

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Ashley is a mental health blogger and nurse who is living with depression. She is the author of two books: Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis and Psych Meds Made Simple.