Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, I have a job?!
Not just any job, but essentially my dream job, unexpectedly handed to me on a silver platter.
How did I get here? Let’s rewind.
In June of 2025, I began the long, arduous humiliation ritual of applying for SSDI disability benefits. A few months prior, I had been so severely depressed I was forced to quit my previous position as a research assistant. The depression combined with the brain fog and other cognitive impairment made it impossible to keep up with the demands of full time in-person work.
Embracing the nuance of what it means to be mad includes being realistic about the immense challenges madness brings. The ability to hold down a job is one of them. In my entire adult life, I’ve never been able to stay at a full-time job with an outside employer for more than seven months. (Americorps VISTA year excluded, that doesn’t really count.) My longest career stint came when I was a self-employed web developer, a type of work that is now inaccessible to me due to persistent cognitive impairment.
It’s not that I’m never capable of working. It’s just that after a few months, I get overwhelmed, and when I get overwhelmed, I get depressed and suicidal. And then I quit rather than killing myself, which I think is fair.
Or, on the flip side, I start escalating into mania, which was the case in 2023.
In 2023, I had the cutest, nicest little job as a library cataloger. In every way, it would have been so manageable—if it wasn’t for the schedule. I had to be in at 8am everyday. Not unreasonable, except that I was taking the only antidepressant that consistently works for me, a vintage MAOI that comes with pretty extreme side effects including severe insomnia. I couldn’t fall asleep until late at night and still had to wake up at 6:30 or so to make it to work. And they were very strict about clocking in—if you clocked in at 8:07 you’re fine, but 8:08? You get a penalty. I quickly started racking those penalties up.
The extremely frustrating thing is that I sought out formal ADA accommodations at this job once I realized this was becoming a problem. I just wanted a change or reduction in my hours. But I didn’t disclose my diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I was scared. Instead, I got my psychiatrist to write a letter focused on the insomnia and my need for adjusted hours due to sleep. This led to an extremely invalidating and demoralizing conversation with the disability representative in which I felt interrogated and in which my symptoms were not being taken seriously. I felt torn between disclosing my diagnosis to highlight the seriousness of this issue and being terrified to disclose. I opted not to disclose.
This led to a weeks-long process during which they hemmed and hawed about whether it would be possible to grant my request for a reduction in hours or a later start time. They acted like it was this huge, complex puzzle to solve. Meanwhile, I still wasn’t sleeping and I started experiencing hypomanic symptoms.
The last straw came up when my supervisor told me I was getting a written warning (a “strike two” kind of situation) for clocking in from my phone, which I sometimes did as I was walking from my car into the building. There was no actual guideline against this, nor was I ever warned about it previously.
I was livid. I wrote an email in which I expressed my frustration about the disability accommodations process and not having my invisible disability taken seriously. I sent it, clocked out for lunch, and walked out of the job. This decision “worked.” Once I was able to sleep in, the hypomanic symptoms abated and never escalated into a full-scale manic episode.
Fast forward back to 2025—when I applied for SSDI, it came down to this: it’s not that I can never work, it’s that 99.9% of workplaces are not willing to accommodate the realities of having a mood disorder (or as I prefer to think of it, a proclivity toward severe depression or extreme states when under persistent stress.) And when these symptoms become severe, I do genuinely lose the ability to work.
I said a few times that if there was some magical job that could accommodate me, I’d apply, but that kind of job doesn’t exist.
Or does it?
Over the course of 2025 and 2026, I began to recover from depression, which I’ve written about elsewhere. It was strange to be recovering while also trying to accept that I’m a disabled person who isn’t capable of traditional work. I had to keep reminding myself that my disability is cyclical. Just because I was “okay” didn’t mean I’d stay stable forever, especially under workplace stress.
Still, as I started gaining the ability to engage with the world more, I wanted to spend more of my time doing meaningful things and contributing to causes I care about. At the top of my list was getting into mental health research and real-world advocacy beyond the internet.
In February of this year, I sent a cold email to Nev Jones, professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh and a preeminent lived experience mental health researcher. Also an academic and personal hero whose work and advocacy I’ve been following since she was consulted on the Public Source article featuring my story of involuntary hospitalization. That was the first time I’d heard her name.
Reaching out to her is something I’d been thinking about for a long time, but took a lot of guts and hyping myself up to actually do. I’m not a student. I graduated college 11 years ago. My research experience was a 6-month stint in which I felt like I’d failed. Still—what really encouraged me is a small section of Nev’s bio on the University of Pittsburgh website.
Dr. Jones is deeply invested in supporting students and early career researchers from groups under-represented in academia. This includes students with psychiatric disabilities, including those conventionally labelled ‘serious mental illness’ and intersections with other areas of marginalization/oppression (e.g. race, class, gender identity, history of incarceration). Current or prospective students with lived experience are encouraged to reach out.
And, damn, that’s me. So I sent the email.
I didn’t hear back, so I mentally moved on to other things—social media mental health advocacy and travel. At least I’d tried.
Actually, I was on a camper van trip and alone in my friend’s adorable apartment in Flagstaff, Arizona when I got the email.
And I am glad I was alone in the apartment because I squealed and jumped around a lot.
Access to Nev and her research lab—Pathlab—was like a portal opening up in front of me. I’ve been jokingly calling the lab “Madness Narnia,” a mythical place where all of the people with the lived experience and values I share existed in the real world. In my own city, even! And this was a crack in the wardrobe door.
Volunteering there meant the ability to get involved in lived experience mental health research, a topic I’m extremely passionate about. It meant the possibility of doing meaningful local advocacy to create tangible change in Pittsburgh.
It also presented an extremely rare path—no pun intended—to higher education. This is a hope I’d given up on when I was forced to quit my research assistant position and accepted I’d probably never be able to work again.
So if there was anything “selfish” I wanted to gain from volunteering, it was letters of recommendation, the missing piece preventing me from applying to graduate school. Between years of self-employment, not being able to stay at jobs, and graduating from college 11 years ago, I never had anyone I was comfortable asking to write one.
Which is all to say: I never expected a job offer!
The way this job was offered to me was the most casual thing in the world.
Pathlab was short-staffed. Nev wanted to hire more people. She asked Lauren, the volunteer coordinator, whether any of the volunteers might want a job.
Lauren named me first. 🥹
This wasn’t an offer to apply. Right from the outset, it was a job offer.
“Hey, I have this extra key to the Madness Narnia wardrobe, do you want it?”
I never even had a traditional interview. I had a Zoom call with Nev while van camping in the woods where, yes, we went over the job and various lab projects, but also just kind of shot the shit about a whole bunch of other things we care about in the mental health sphere. Lots of shared outrage about various systemic things we’re mad about.
I went through several stages of shock and mental upheaval before I got to the excitement stage. There was no question about whether I’d take the job, but I had to work through a lot of internal confusion about the idea of working again after having done so much work to accept I wasn’t capable of doing that.
But this was it. The magical, mythical accommodating job I thought didn’t exist, literally being handed to me on a silver platter based on my enthusiasm about the work alone.
The nature of this job represents something extraordinarily rare: the ability to walk into a role with my lived experience on full display. And even more than that, my lived experiences framed as an asset that contributes to the work.
It was like I’d submitted a resume with—
Experience:
6 months as a research assistant (2024 - 2025)
16 years of severe episodic depression (2011 - present)
4 years of periodic manic episodes with psychosis (2022 - present)
2 involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations (2022, 2024)
Formal Diagnoses:
Bipolar Disorder
Autism
ADHD
PTSD
General Anxiety Disorder
—and it was all taken as seriously as work experience.
All of this also, crucially, means I can be open about my limitations from the outset.
From that first call with Lauren, I’ve been extremely transparent about all of the things that have prevented me from staying at prior jobs.
And at Pathlab, they’re like… not an issue?
I can work mostly remotely with flexible hours. Maybe even from the woods sometimes!
If full-time turns out to be too much, I can work fewer hours. They asked me from the beginning how many hours I’d like to work.
I could actually take leave if mood disorder symptoms prevent me from working, even though I won’t be eligible for FMLA until I’ve been there for a year. I could take leave and still have a job.
And maybe most importantly of all, I can actually communicate about all of my needs without fear of judgement. Perhaps more than anything else, that’s what kept me from staying at previous jobs. I couldn’t be honest because I was scared of stigma or not being taken seriously (which proved to be a valid fear.) I was scared that people wouldn’t understand, or that they would think I was making excuses not to work. So I quietly allowed the overwhelm to build at each job until I couldn’t take it anymore.
That means that even if this job doesn’t work out, I’m not afraid of burning bridges like I have before. I can simply tell them “I think my initial suspicions were correct, I’m not cut out for the workplace.” I can continue as a volunteer. I can maintain those relationships.
And that’s the thing—I am being hyperrealistic about my ability to work. I am contingency planning for another SSDI application. I will be formalizing an extensive list of ADA disability accommodations with the University of Pittsburgh so I have them on record. I’ll be documenting my experiences in the workplace in detail with my therapist and psychiatrist. I am doing everything in my power to make this a win-win situation, even if this turns out to be another “failed work attempt” (as the SSA puts it.)
For the first time ever, instead of telling myself “okay, this time you’re going to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and become a functioning adult who works a job like everyone else,” I’m accepting my own limitations and anticipating the ways things can and will go wrong. I’m accommodating myself.
I have to admit, one of the feelings that’s arisen as I take in what this opportunity means for me is a savage sense of mixed vindictiveness and vindication.
When my friends instigated my involuntary hospitalization in 2022, they told me it was their only option. In other words,
“This is for your own good.”
In the aftermath, I felt a lot of pressure to accept this. I was out of control. I was crazy. I wanted to prove I was a reasonable and rational person who could understand their perspective in making the decision they did.
Mainstream societal messaging, even in mental health spaces, only affirms this framing. They treat involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations as if they’re a minor inconvenience. Worth it to “save lives.”
I could never fully swallow that. And I am so, so proud of myself for never giving in. I fought back so hard against that narrative that I’m creating a life and career out of my trauma and rage.
Not only that—I am specifically going to have the opportunity to research civil commitments in Allegheny County. I am going to have the opportunity to do advocacy around this issue. I’ve been handed a megaphone and I’m about to use it to make a lot of people deeply uncomfortable.
See, my hospitalization was a data point in two very fascinating studies. One was the county’s own assessment of the outcomes of its involuntary hospitalizations (referred to as “302s” in Pennsylvania.)
The results were horrifying.
Within 5 years, there is a 20% mortality rate in the population of those who have been involuntarily hospitalized here in Allegheny County.
Let me say that again. In the Pittsburgh area,
ONE IN FIVE OF US WHO HAVE BEEN INVOLUNTARILY HOSPITALIZED ARE DEAD.
But that’s not all. See, an even more interesting study came out of the county’s 302 data. The study used statistical magic to demonstrate a very strong causal link between the involuntary hospitalizations themselves and a variety of negative outcomes, including:
A nearly doubled risk of dying by suicide.
A nearly doubled risk of dying by overdose.
A higher rate of being incarcerated for violent crimes.
A higher chance of experiencing homelessness.
I am more than a datapoint.
I am more than a number, a statistic.
I can tell you precisely why the trauma of having your autonomy stripped from you leads to the outcomes identified in the 302 causal study.
I can trace a straight line from my involuntary hospitalization in 2022 to a narrowly avoided plan to kill myself in late 2024.
My face and my story are already out there.
I’m going to start telling that story more often, more publicly.
I’m going to look local leaders in the eye and ask them why they’re okay with one in five of us dying.
I’m going to ask them what they plan to do about it.
I’m going to make them face me, a survivor. More than a number.
I’m going to find more of us.
It’s time to start holding this city and county accountable.
It’s time to start creating alternatives. And I might finally have the tools and connections to do it.
This is just the beginning.
