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More than 20% of Americans will be diagnosed with a mental illness in their lifetime. They will, that is, experience situations that affect the way they think, feel, and act – and which may initially seem incompatible with the demands of work.
Our new research shows that what people with chronic mental illnesses need most to succeed at work is for their managers to be flexible and trusting.
This includes the freedom to adjust their schedules and workloads to make their jobs more compatible with efforts to manage and treat their symptoms. For this to happen, managers need to trust that these employees are committed to their jobs and their employers.
We’re management professors who reviewed hundreds of blogs and Reddit posts and conducted in-depth interviews with 59 people. And these are the most important findings of our peer-reviewed study, published in the October 2025 issue of the Academy of Management Journal.
Investigating Reddit Posts and Conducting Interviews
We gathered our data from three sources: anonymous blog posts from 171 people, Reddit posts from 781 people, and in-depth interviews with 59 workers employed in various jobs across multiple industries.
All of these people worked while dealing with chronic mental illnesses like major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and bipolar disorder. The blog posts were created by a non-profit organization concerned with the experiences of individuals suffering from mental illness. We focused on posts with the tag “work”.
To identify relevant data on Reddit, we searched using a combination of the word “work” with several words associated with mental illness. Additionally, we limited our data collection to unsolicited narratives published before mid-March 2020 to avoid overlap with employment changes that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since this data was collected from the Internet, we could not obtain details about the participants’ gender, age, profession, or education.
We recruited men for interviews through social media postings, advertising on public university alumni lists, and contacting an organization that focuses on men’s mental health. We also solicited people we had already interviewed to see if they potentially had recommendations for other people to interview.
Interviews took place in 2020 and 2021.
Interact with people from all walks of working life
About 37% of those we interviewed identified as female and their average age was 41.5 years. About 80% of them identified as Caucasian, 3.5% as Black, 3.5% as Hispanic, and less than 2% identified as Indian, Korean American, mixed race, or Middle Eastern and North African. About 3.5% chose not to answer.
He held a variety of jobs, including lawyer, professor, touring musician, consultant, teacher, real estate manager, chief technology officer, salesman, restaurant server, travel agency manager, graphic designer, tester for a manufacturing plant, chemical engineer, and bus driver. Many people worked in technical fields.
When the employees we studied were trusted and given flexibility, they were better able to focus on their own well-being while also doing their work.
Employees who had been living with their condition for years used what we call “individualized isolation and engagement strategies” to manage their symptoms. This refers to the fact that people suffering from mental illness respond best to different coping strategies based on their own preferences and symptoms, rather than using self-help resources or general techniques learned from peers.
Examples of personalized disengagement strategies range from leaving the workplace to meditate, to going for a walk, to finding a quiet place to cry.
Engagement strategies included becoming more deeply immersed in work and interacting with coworkers. These coping strategies will sound familiar to most people, including those who do not have any long-term mental health problems. But workplaces do not always give employees, regardless of their disability status, the flexibility and self-determination needed to implement their own strategies. In fact, a recent survey by Mind Share Partners found that nearly half of employees didn’t feel like they could disconnect from their jobs after work hours or during vacation.
Many staff also told us that they benefited from confidence and resilience in the period following diagnosis when they needed to explore different treatments and healing techniques.
When managers allow flexibility, trust employees to do what they want to overcome their symptoms, and express their compassion, employees with chronic mental illness are more likely to keep their jobs and get their work done.
impress most employers
Mental illnesses became more prevalent following COVID-19, especially among adolescents and young adults.
So, if you are an employer, chances are our research is relevant to your workforce.
The World Health Organization estimated that depression, a common mental illness, cost an estimated US$1 trillion annually in lost productivity in 2019.
People with anxiety and mood disorders, including bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, may have symptoms from time to time that interfere with their ability to work.
And while doing those jobs, they risk being stigmatized by coworkers who know little about mental illness or may be judgmental about people with those chronic conditions. This increases stress far beyond what others would experience at work.
Employee assistance programs may fall short
In response, many employers offer benefits to help employees deal with mental and emotional problems, such as employee assistance programs, mental-wellness app subscriptions, and stigma-reduction efforts.
These one-size-fits-all initiatives can help improve functioning for people with occasional or short-term emotional problems, and they can help improve the ability of leaders to respond to employee distress, which is important.
But overall, they are not enough to solve the problem.
Employee assistance programs, which almost all large companies offer, have not been proven to systematically help workers achieve their goals. One study found that they reduced employees’ absenteeism but did not reduce their work-related distress.
Another study also found that workers who used these programs became more willing to leave their jobs.
Don’t miss the top performers
Contrary to stereotypes, people suffering from chronic anxiety and depression, such as those we studied, are generally just as capable of achieving success in the workplace as anyone else in the right context.
Extremely high performers, such as the late actor Carrie Fisher and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, are two examples of people with mental illness who were top achievers in their fields.
About the authors
Sherry Thatcher is the Riegel Distinguished Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Tennessee. Emily Rosado-Solomon is an assistant professor of management at Babson College. This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons license. read the original article,
If you were a manager, wouldn’t you want people of this caliber working for you? If so, it is important to create the right conditions, which many employers fail to do despite their best efforts.
need more mental health support
Companies will face increasing pressure to support people struggling with mental illness and other mental health challenges.
Monster’s 2024 State of the Graduate report found that Gen Z employees, those born between 1996 and 2010 and currently in their teens and 20s, are increasingly prioritizing support for mental health at work, with 92% of 18 to 24-year-olds surveyed wanting a job where they feel comfortable discussing their mental health at work.
This trend suggests that employers seeking to attract top entry-level talent will need to effectively support mental health, highlighting the importance of continuing research on this issue.