The Cost of Transparency: Living with Schizoaffective Disorder in Tech

Summary

"We celebrate mental health awareness until someone actually needs mental health support." In The Inclusion Illusion, I explored how tech companies perform diversity while quietly eliminating employees who actually need accommodations. What I didn't share was the personal cost of that analysis—how living openly with schizoaffective disorder has systematically excluded me from the very communities I helped build. Over the past few years, I've worked for at least twenty companies, cycling through positions as organizations discovered my mental health history and found creative ways to make me unwelcomeThis isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion. Each departure followed the same script: initial technical success, mental health disclosure or visibility, growing discomfort, elegant elimination.. The pattern is consistent: initial enthusiasm for my technical contributions, followed by discomfort when my condition becomes visible, and finally the inevitable "restructuring" or "cultural fit" conversations that push me toward the exit. This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience. The discrimination starts in healthcare itself. When I seek treatment for schizoaffective disorder, providers often approach me with a mixture of fear and condescension that would be immediately recognized as unacceptable if directed at any other patient population. I've had therapists decline to continue working with me without clear explanations, leaving me to wonder whether my openness about my condition or my technical background created discomfort they couldn't navigate. I've had doctors become visibly afraid of me after witnessing me during an acute episode, their fear palpable in subsequent interactions. During inpatient treatment, I've been accused of not taking prescribed medication when I was compliant, as if the persistence of symptoms could only be explained by patient deception rather than the complex reality of trea...