Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “career”
Do you have a five-year plan? Are you a goal-setter or do you prefer to “muddle through”? For some the idea of making a written life plan is a no-brainer, while for others it sounds like an idea from an alien planet. Making a plan for the future is a strategy that can help when life feels chaotic and directionless. …
Do you have an impossible job? An impossible job is a job where the scope of the work is so great that it is not possible to do all of the reasonable things related to that job. As an extreme example, if you are a busy emergency room doctor, there is no way you can do everything that you possibly …
Bipolar At Work: Disclosure and Accommodation Federal law provides important protections for workers who are coping with disabling mental or physical illnesses in the workplace. Know your rights, and plan carefully for whether, when and how to request accommodations and disclose special needs at work. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against anyone with a health-realted disablitiy in …
Successful Return to Work Return to work is an important step in the recovery process for many people with bipolar or depression. Work is not just important financially. It is an key source of self-esteem and purpose, and a place where many people experience a strong sense of community. For these reasons, return to work is often an extremely important …
What are your employment rights if you have bipolar? Do you need to tell your employer? Should you tell your employer? What if you’re looking for a job, when can your potential employer ask you about bipolar? We ran across a nice summary with some very useful links on the Bipolar Network News website. Attorney Katharine Gordon writes – It …
I recently spent an interesting half an hour talking with a very successful businessman who has bipolar about how to get his office work done even though he has periods when he is depressed, and his thought processes are slowed down. One of his big issues is that when he is depressed he finds himself staring off into space rather than working his …
A young woman who is attending architecture school mentioned a sudden dip in mood that happened the previous evening. She told me that this had to do with a day of working very hard to try to get tasks accomplished, and the anger and frustration at the end of the day when she hadn’t done as much as she wanted to, …
The other day I was asked to evaluate a fellow physician by his disability insurance company. When I do disability assessments I take particular care, because what I say has big implications for the person I am evaluating, and I try very hard to do an extremely careful and thorough job of assessing the person’s situation. Three quarters of the …
One of the hottest topics on our forum is when, and how, to tell people about your depression or bipolar. The question of telling an employer is a particularly tricky one since, on the one hand, sharing information about a “chronic medical condition” allows you to claim certain benefits that are guaranteed by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and on …
Late on a Friday afternoon, I found myself with two patients (back to back) who were yawning and seemingly drifting off during the course of our conversation. Now, that could have meant that I was being particularly boring. But, in this case, it was the manifestation in the office of something that had been going on at home and causing …
The New York Times recently published an intriguing article entitled “Relax, You Will Be More Effective.” It arrived at just the right time. Preparing for an upcoming vacation had made me particularly hectic. And then, while I was on vacation and writing this post, I got a blog post from MoodScope which was devoted to the importance of taking regular …
When and whether to tell people about a mood disorder is a topic of great interest to readers of this blog. Disorderly Chickadee is a very personal, and very well written, blog about living with bipolar. Yesterday’s post was all about coming out about bipolar – in this case it was about telling your boss. We think many of you …
Coming out– One of the topics that has generated the most interest on this site has to do with whether to tell others about the challenges you have to deal with as the result of moods, especially whether to tell people that you have a diagnosis of a mood disorder. I have written a bit about this topic in a …
In another post, we talked about the question of whether or not to tell friends and family about the challenges of living with mood disorders and, in particular, whether or not to share a diagnosis (such as bipolar). The discussions there about the many misunderstandings and misconceptions about moods and mood disorders that are commonplace in our society is relevant …
How much money does it take for someone to feel really secure? This seems like a sensible question. Certainly, many of us have been dealing with insecurity because of a lack of money. In other words, there is a relationship between money and security. On the other hand, over the years, we have never run into anyone who managed to …
This past weekend, we were at a Halloween party talking to a computer engineer who recently moved here from Holland. The topic turned to a discussion of things that are unusual about Americans, in particular, the American relationship to work and vacations. We take less vacation than almost any industrialized country in the world. Of course, we think it’s responsible …
Anger is a necessary emotion. It can motivate to change things for the better, to protect ourselves from evil, to re-shape our lives in better and more satisfying ways. But chronic anger, especially chronic anger about things that can’t be changed because they are in the distant past, is a life-destroying emotion. Occasionally we meet with people who are out …
Hard working professionals go on vacation and immediately get sick. This doesn’t happen just once, it is regular and reliable. What is going on? If this has happened to you, you are getting a crash course on the physiology of the body’s stress response system, and some of its flaws. It was developed to deal with very different problems than …
The key to being productive (and managing anxiety) is using tools to keep track of things that you have to do… and, most important, hiding things that you will have to do at some future time but don’t need to do now. We think that one of the reasons we have this state called “anxiety” is because in human history …
We were talking to a young woman trying to figure out how to maintain more of a balance in her life. She knows that one of the challenges with energized moods is that they can lead to becoming over-committed. On the other hand, one of the great things about that energy is that it often results in getting a lot done. So how do you find …
