[neekburm]

I wrote an article about the ADA amendments a few years ago:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/246397486/The-ADAAA-Congress-Brea...

Major depression, or the perception that someone is depressed, is now considered a disability that the ADA applies to.

If an employer takes a hostile action (denial of promotion, firing, etc.) against someone based on their disability, the victim can sue the employer.

Proving that they fired you because of the article will be an issue, but a skilled disability attorney can probably do that. Presuming that you were otherwise a good employee, it probably won't be too hard to prove that the article was the reason. Talk to a disability attorney, or just contact the EEOC.

http://www.eeoc.gov/employees/charge.cfm

[serf]

This is impossible to word without sounding bad, but I'm legitimately curious as to how the situation would play out:

If a workplace terminated an employee due to writings that the employee wrote which alienated the rest of the workplace and made them feel unsafe, wouldn't that be a pretty easy thing to attest in court ,that the termination was not wrongful but rather motivated by trying to keep a friendly work atmosphere and ensure workers' safety?

That seems like the thing to focus in on if one were to be defending against such a case.

[DanBC]

> and made them feel unsafe

If a person makes a direct threat then yes, obviously the employer can take action to protect their work force.

But why do you think of violence when we're talking about mental illness? The vast majority of violent crime is committed by people who do not have a mental illness.

Your comment is stigmatizing and ignorant. OP is male. You do not seem to be askin about the risk of violence because of his maleness even though most violent crime is commited by men.

About one in six people over 16 have a significant mental health problem. The US has a population of hundreds of million people over sixteen - let's say 250million. That gives about 41 million people with a significant mental illness. Each year about 16,000 people are murdered in US, so even if every single murder was committed by someone with a mental illness you still have 41million (minus 16,000) safe people who have a mental health problem. But research suggests that only about 10% of mirder is committed by someone with a mental illness.

[1] using current UK terminology

[serf]

>Your comment is stigmatizing and ignorant. OP is male. You do not seem to be askin about the risk of violence because of his maleness even though most violent crime is commited by men.

I wrote a big, long diatribe about how wrong it was of you to inject a weird sexism-hued gender argument, but I erased it.

I don't believe that asking a question is ever stigmatizing if done in good faith, and my question (which, by the way, is distinct from a comment) is most certainly in good faith. My question may certainly have been ignorant, but the removal of such ignorance is exactly the goal of my question! I ask to become wiser, I promise.

Simply put : I didn't ask about his gender because it wasn't his gender which alienated me towards him. The product of his authorship; the blog post and the details therein, is what alienated me towards him.

The blog post, with what dangerously little knowledge of psychology I have, made me feel as if it were written by a psychopath. I don't care to state specific reasons publicly. Psychopaths have a larger incidence of impulsive/threatening/amoral behaviors by definition than so-called 'normal' behaviors. That's the reason why I feel compelled to think of violence.

My jump towards violence wasn't as vague as 'mentally ill', but rather specifically towards descriptions of activities within that blog post which I categorized mentally as psychopathic.

One assumes that his co-workers were untrained in mental health disciplines, just as I am. I don't think that it is unreasonable to assume that upon reading the post they may have felt the same way as I did.

Let me distill the actual question for you, so that you can answer the right one this time.

The question was : "If an employee sues for wrongful termination after writing a blog post which has the effect of alienating people towards him, wouldn't it be quite easy to have that workforce testify that "X blog post made me feel Y.", and if so doesn't this pose a problem for OP and his plans to sue?"

The assumption that question falls upon is that I'm not the only person who was alienated by the blog post, and I would assume that if the author was actually an acquaintance that the effect would be stronger.

The question was asked as a hypothetical 'what-if' for possible motives behind the termination; a piece of the overall brainstorming session behind OPs lawsuit, and also a chance for me to better understand how laws work regarding such things. Please use a friendlier tone if you'd care to educate others. I feel that your passion for finding fair treatment for the ill is preventing you from reading what I wrote and considering my actual question without turning into a mouthpiece and discarding the question entirely.

[crazypyro]

You'd have a pretty hard time making the case that the OP was making his co-workers feel unsafe unless you had some concrete proof of a threat of violence or something along that lines.

Not wanting to work with a depressed person is not a valid termination reason because of the categorization as a disability.

[neekburm]

I agree with this analysis. You'd need concrete proof of threat. Otherwise, any employer facing an ADA claim based on mental illness could use the excuse "We're afraid he'll murder us all in a depressed rage" to win.

Reading the post in question, I think the addiction issues are another possible cause of the employer's actions.

Addiction can also be considered an actionable disability, but you have to be treating it or otherwise on the wagon to file suit. I don't have a citation to that on hand, but it's out there.

[fadelakin]

I should mention that I've managed to curb my addiction for the past year and a half now. Coming up to two years clean in December.

[beaverton392]

This is assuming there was an employment relationship. Were you under an employment agreement or was this an independent contractor arrangement?