A few posters on here are suggesting that having a disability - be it physical or a mental health issue - which periodically interferes with your ability to do your job, means you should ‘leave and find something else’. I thought that in the 21st century we’d moved away from attitudes like these.
I assume that that is a dig at my posts? I do wish people would name names instead of the passive aggressive 'some people', or 'a few posters'.
I am the one who brought in the ability to do your job, and likened it to having a physical disability, so I will assume that this is what you are getting at, and respond again, although I have made the point several times already.
If you go blind and you are a bus driver, what do you do? However much you miss driving your bus, and however much you didn't ask to go blind, however much it was not caused by a weakness of character or anything else, you are not able to do that job, so you have to leave and do something else.
If you want to be a brain surgeon, but don't have a specialist degree, you won't get an interview. Is that discrimination, or is it a sensible means of ensuring that only those with the right capabilities are able to operate? Either way, you can't be a brains surgeon without the qualifications, so you do something else.
What is the difference between the above examples and someone with a condition that means that they cannot deal with stress, particularly if that person responds to this by taking time off work and expecting colleagues to pick up their workload on top of their own, regardless of the impact on the colleagues' mental health?
What have I said there that suggests that I don't support making full use of people's abilities? Someone who can't handle stress will have other abilities, and they should find work that enables them to make the best of them.
You yourself are suggesting that there should be separate facilities for the disabled - is that not discriminatory, or at least acknowledging that sometimes people need to be cut some slack in the workplace? I am not arguing for anything less.
The difference is that I am also taking into account that when someone is regularly off work because some of the tasks that their job demands are too much for them, this impacts on their colleagues, and can have a detrimental effect on the colleagues' mental health.
I have never said that people with mental health issues shouldn't work, or that they are in any way responsible for their condition. What I have said is that just as if someone can't be a brain surgeon without the requisite qualifications and aptitude, or a bus driver without the ability to see clearly, someone who doesn't have the ability to deal with stress should not expect to be paid to do a stressful job if they are not able to do it.
And yes, I do think that this is very different from someone discovering that she is unable to continue to compete at the highest level, and making the decision to leave. That could not have been predicted, and was not a pattern of behaviour.
What Simone Biles did is what I wish my colleague had done, instead of spending the last ten years of her time in the workplace doing as little as possible, safe in the knowledge that others would do the things she didn't want to do.
We didn't 'whine' about it, incidentally, but I can assure you that it wasn't 'a bit of extra work' that we picked up - it was often the whole of a professional role that was split between the two of us who were left when she went off for months at a time, and that was on top of our own stressful workloads. She should have paid a visit to the Jobcentre, and found something less stressful to do, but she didn't, because she was used to the salary that she was paid for (not) doing a stressful job.