It would be seen as discrimination to offer a reduced salary and position based on the fact an employee has a disability. Check out the Americans with Disabilities Act in the USA, or your local state or city employment laws. Always study up on employment laws before you decide to do anything like that, as well as check with HR for advice as well.

If your employees are harassing and bullying a person because they are disabled, you are liable for that as well.

The only reason why I couldn't have a lawsuit against my former employers is because lawyers don't want to handle a case if the person they have to represent is mentally ill, so there is discrimination there as well. For example my testimony would be questioned in court because of the fact that I am mentally ill. Sure I had the right to sue, sure the EEOC approved my case, but I could not find a lawyer to represent me in 180 days and the statues of limitation ran out.

Now you can accommodate them if this comes up by asking your staff not to bully and harass them for being mentally ill. If they have problems sleeping you can accommodate them to working a third shift at different hours (some sleep disorders happen because of sunlight or anxiety and if you allow them to sleep in they will be refreshed at nighttime during the third shift). If they need to go to a hospital to be treated there is a short-term disability and a federal family medial leave act that prevents you from firing them or giving them a reduce salary or reduce position for missing work.

When I studied business management we studied employment law. I advise you to do the same if you haven't already.

Make sure you document everything you do with HR to protect yourself, including any accommodating things you do to help. If you are not trying to accommodate the disabled person, it can be seen as discrimination. Make sure you document any lost productivity, as well as anything you are trying to do to help the disabled person recover productivity.

Use this test, if the person were blind or deaf or legless, would you treat them the same? If not, you could be discriminating against them.

More information I forgot for my first post.

If an employee is having problems getting work done due to a disability there usually is an EAP Employee Assistance Program recommended by the state or city you can refer the employee to for counseling, evaluation, and treatment that can help them recover and get their work done. This is usually reserved for mental health issues, stress, depression, alcoholism, personal problems like divorce or spousal abuse aka domestic violence and emotional cruelty etc.

Also employment law has a clause in it that if the employer suffers an undue hardship in accommodating the employee, it can be used as a defense in a discrimination trial. If the employee wins the discrimination trail they are usually awarded one year of their salary (The lawyers usually collect 2/3rds of this amount for legal fees, leaving 1/3rd for the employee) and in some if not most cases the lawsuit is usually settled out of court to avoid negative publicity.

Honestly because I've been on disability for so long, I'd take a reduced salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human being for once. It is not the money nor the position, it is being treated fairly that I look for, and that means the right company and the right manager. I would not even mind doing PC repairs and troubleshooting instead of programming or something else like that.

> I'd take a reduced salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human being for once.

Right, that's the thrust of my question. A person with a mental illness may not simply be capable of providing the value to their company of say a $150k/yr job, but firing them sort of implies to me that they have no value to the company. If the employee is able to show that they can provide value to the company, just at a lower position I'm thinking that would be a good alternative to outright firing.

Not talking about your case specifically, I can say this, from an employees perspective, having a peer that is not pulling their weight for whatever reason is infuriating as the slack ultimately ends up on the other employees.

From personal experience, I've had several peers who couldn't fulfill their full-time job assignments (for a wide variety of reasons), and I and my other team mates were already pulling 40-50 hour weeks. Having to add another 5-10 hours per week to our loads to make up for one of our peers was really simply unfair to us as well.

I provided value to the company, I migrated legacy code to modern programming languages, I debugged the code from other programmers that couldn't figure out why their programs didn't work right, I was one of the few that actually wrote documentation, used a standard naming convention for variables, used comments in code to explain to other programmers what it did, I converted from MS-Access databases to MS-SQL Server because nobody else knew how. I wouldn't say I was the best, but I did valuable work.

I mean the original article in this thread is a man with schizophrenia who was a success at college, how is he less valuable to the college because he is schizophrenic? John Forbes Nash Jr. is schizophrenic and he won an award for economics in the Nobel Prize, should he be given a lower salary and lower position because he is mentally ill?

The other workers could not finish their tasks because they were too busy trying to bully and harass me, so management reassigned many of their tasks to me to finish. I even took work home and worked at home for no extra pay to meet deadlines.

But because of the constant stress from the bullying and harassment I would keep becoming sicker and sicker, yet I was able to still get work done. Eventually I suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress and had a panic attack at work, and then was fired on that very same day. That experience had broken me, and my doctors put me on disability being too sick to work. Being put on disability also broke me, it made me develop a mental block and writer's block which I am only now overcoming.

But had I not been bullied and harassed, I would still be doing valuable work and earning even more money.

I admit there are those out there smarter and better than me, but I am not an idiot because I am mentally ill despite people thinking that.

Thanks for bringing that question up. This is what I think you should do if it happens. I think when someone develops such disability, we really should offer them support instead of stigmatization and neglect. You should definitely talk about the issue openly with the employee about he/she thinks he/she can still do and what the doctor thinks is the best for him/her. Mental disorder is almost always triggered by stress; therefore, I believe lowering stress would definitely help. Some disorders (i.e., major depression) are episodic and short-termed. If the person receives enough support and treatment, his/her conditions can improve quickly. I think depending on how fast the person is able to recover, you can then consider about lower salary and position. It is very nice that you brought the problem up. I think how you treat your employees in such situations will really show how much your company value your employees and treat them with respect and care.

In my case each cycle lasts for about two weeks and usually a bad cycle is caused by stress, ect. Sometimes it is a chemical imbalance as well. But I have normal cycles as well from time to time.

What could help is determining the mental cycle and then cross training the employee for different work in the office and during a bad cycle change them to low stress work, and during a normal cycle back to regular work and having other employees work on projects with them that can take over due to a bad cycle and then give control back once that cycle ends. Also educating the coworkers and employees not to treat the employee bad during the bad cycles and avoid stressing them out.

Some things they could do instead of programming:

Documentation of software and requirements.

Quantity Assurance testing of software.

Database design and maintenance.

Doing research into new technology and beta testing products and filing reports on them.

Monitoring print queues and servers for potential problems and reading log files for errors and crashes and reporting on them.