Out of the blue: Book excerpt

Toxic workplaces inspire (common but costly) "depessive realism".

by Jan Wong

Depressives see their glasses as always half empty, which some would argue is a more accurate and realistic view of the world around them, especially if they toil in a toxic workplace. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud suggested that depressives have “a keener eye for the truth.” Andrew Solomon describes a study in which depressed people who played a video game for half an hour knew precisely how many monsters they had slaughtered whereas those who weren’t depressed guessed four to six more than they had actually killed.

Kyla Dunn, a freelance journalist and former biotech researcher, calls this phenomenon “depressive realism.” Depression is not the near-death experience described by so many, she suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview. “One cognitive symptom of depression might be the loss of optimistic, self-enhancing biases that normally protect healthy people against assaults to their self-esteem. In many instances, depressives may simply be judging…  the world more accurately than non-depressed people, and finding it not a pretty place.”

Take workplace friendships, for instance. Work had been the defining structure of my life. My obsession with work had fooled me into misconstruing professional relationships as personal friendships. I thought I had many friends in the newsroom. But as months passed, it dawned on me that if I wasn’t at work, I no longer existed — for these friends.

From my isolated vantage point, it seemed as though the camaraderie of the workplace had vanished at the first whiff of trouble. Or I thought perhaps the stigma of depression was affecting co-workers, too, and they preferred to stay safely away. When I was ill, only a handful of colleagues got in touch. At least, that’s how I remember it. Many later told me they had no idea what was going on because I hadn’t said anything.

People who have experienced depression often become more empathetic to the outside world (even while remaining angry and narcissistic with family). I must have radiated empathy once I was back in the newsroom. Colleagues began telling me their own stories.

My friend, Val Ross, organized drinks after work with two other Globe reporters. Over glasses of merlot at Le Sélect Bistro, they assured me I wasn’t alone. The three, all women, revealed that they, too, had been sick from work-related stress. Val told me she had been taking antidepressants for years. When I said I was frightened of meds and hadn’t taken them, she smiled. “It’s the only way I can stand working here.” 

I had always admired Val. She was a brilliant journalist who had covered the literary beat and later worked as an editor on the Op-Ed page. It shocked me that she had been depressed. She certainly didn’t look it. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? A depressed person can look like her, a beautiful, elegant, successful woman with a captivating smile and a mischievous sense of humor.

My colleagues’ depression was largely hidden from view. But some workplaces are so lethal they end up in the headlines.

At France Télécom, the world’s third-largest telecommunications company, forty-three employees killed themselves between January 2008 and February 2009 after the second-in-command, dubbed “Cost-killer,” engineered the layoffs of 22,000 employees. Several left suicide notes explicitly blaming the workplace.

“Cost-killer” resigned and the entire management team was replaced. An interim report commissioned by Télécom warned that the new management team had to address the suicide crisis and “encourage radical change.” 

For surviving employees, a toxic workplace can exact a serious toll. Researchers at the University of Manitoba found that the emotional cost of workplace bullying now surpasses that of sexual harassment. Victims of bullying are becoming ill from anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

At least one in three American workers has experienced bullying on the job, according to a survey by the research firm, IBOPE Zogby International. The harassment can be as trivial as a smirk. It can include belittling comments or an amused shake of the head every time the victim says something at a meeting. It often involves repeated failure to return calls or answer email, “forgetting” to include someone in an important meeting, assigning a project doomed to fail or stripping someone of critical duties and then accusing them of not doing the job.

A brilliantly conceived research project is following the health and career of more than ten thousand British civil servants, a perfect cohort because everyone has an identifiable rank, yet access to the same quality of medical care. Since 1967, the Whitehall Studies have found that the lower the rank, the higher the incidence of various illnesses, including high blood pressure, heart attacks and depression — just like the baboons Sapolsky studied.

The insurance industry is feeling the hit. Manulife Financial Group — yes, the same Manulife company intervening in my sick leave — calls mental-health claims the fastest-growing category of disability costs in Canada, according to Benefits Canada, a trade publication. Manulife, a global insurer that operates in the United States as John Hancock Financial, blames the soaring cost of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. It says that lost productivity for mental illness in Canada alone costs more than $8 billion a year.

© Copyright Jan Wong 2012 All rights reserved

© Copyright 2012 Jan Wong, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca