Bad Bosses·
DISMISSAL AFTER DISCLOSURE
A young DC employee discloses bipolar disorder to her boss, sparking a rapid, disputed layoff and exposing how a tiny team handles mental health in the workplace.
Was this a layoff or a firing?
Be one of the first to vote.
A 24-year-old woman in Washington, DC, told her boss she had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and a few hours later, she was told the team had "voted" to fire her.
She had been working at a tiny company, with fewer than six people total, and by her own account, the job had started to slip. She missed calls. She dropped the ball on a few things. Then came a one-on-one with her boss about performance, the kind of meeting that usually turns on one question: what's really going on?
According to the poster, the boss asked her to be "completely honest." So she was.
She said, "I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder," and added that she was dealing with mental health struggles and "other very serious family issues." She later summed up the moment bluntly: "I need to figure myself out and fix my mental health."
The boss wanted details. She asked when the diagnosis happened, wrote it down in her notes, and told the poster she would share it with the rest of the team. That detail landed hard enough that the poster later said the boss "do not allow for people to push back on her."
Then came the second meeting, just hours later.
The boss called her back in and said the team had "voted" to let her go because they didn't trust her anymore. The poster says the boss told her the separation would be labeled a "layoff," even though the reason given was performance and "laziness."
She says there was no formal write-up, no performance improvement plan, no discussion of accommodations, and no HR involved. Just the disclosure, the notes, and the firing.
The timing is what has her worried. In her telling, the diagnosis and the dismissal happened on the same day, in the same stretch of hours, with the same boss handling both conversations.
She wrote that her "mental health disclosure confirmed I wasn't cut out for the job," and said she didn't expect special treatment. "I didn't expect a free pass. I just didn't want to lie."
She also noted that her firing came at a bad time for the small team, because "one of the other employees is going on maternity leave and this will put us in a tough spot."
Now she's asking what, if anything, she can do about it, and whether this can be reported. Her question is simple enough, but the sequence is not: performance talk, diagnosis, notes taken, team told, then fired the same day.