In a recent discussion in City Journal on the HBO movie “Too Big to Fail” I wonder how the producers missed the chance to explain why AIG imploded:

 As a Wall Street veteran, including stints at AIG, S&P and briefly, Lehman, I felt that “Inside Job” was overly simplistic, and that both films missed the boat big time on AIG.

The story started a few years earlier, when Spitzer ousted AIG CEO Hank Greenberg, which caused stock analysts to downgrade the company immediately, necessitating a scramble to increase reserves. Everyone on Wall Street knew that without Greenberg AIG was a Leviathan without a head. The gambling spree in the credit default business proved this.

Unlike his successors, Greenberg always knew where every position and dime was, every minute, and would not hesitate to get out of any business that threatened its financial integrity.

I’m not defending the company’s ethics, before or after Greenberg, but I do think ordinary Americans would feel less helpless if they had a more complete picture of the events.

But having spent most of my career trying to educate the average American about finances, I must report that they just don’t want to know. If someone else is getting 30% annual returns, they want it, too. The hardest thing is defending a conservative investment strategy to the greedy investor, who will just take his money elsewhere for better returns, damn the risks.

These movies do nothing to encourage citizens to take responsibility for their own actions. It’s easier to keep blaming the “big swinging dicks” and feel bitter and victimized. If everyone had to read the text book for the Series 7 Securities exam — not even take the test, just read it — the financial crisis wouldn’t have happened.

I have lots of friends with Ivy graduate degrees who were stunned, absolutely shocked that their stocks weren’t guaranteed investments, despite signing prospectuses.

Both films ended by delivering the grim news that the financial crisis further consolidated the banking industry and made its leaders richer than ever. This is all true enough. But I wonder why American high school students learn so much about sex — pro or con — but few graduate knowing the difference between a stock and a bond?

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0525ngjm.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never wanted to revisit an unpleasant dorm experience at University of Rhode Island in 1979. But in my alumni quarterly, I read this very important, very long article on the prevalence of gay harrassment on campus, without hearing from someone who’d gone through something like me. 

My story is in the comments section at the end of the piece.

 http://www.uri.edu/quadangles/features/making-uri-a-place-where-everyone-feels-safe-respected-and-valued/

In a related vein, City Journal’s Bruce Thornton discusses “How Assimilation Works” — or doesn’t in the state of California:

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/cjc0517bt.html

In the comments section I write:

I took an English Phd level course at my east coast alma mater twenty years after graduating. The course turned out not to be about the literature of California, as professed, but a political screed.

The reading list was given over to accounts of minorities’ victimization at the hands of the white man — certainly part of the story, but not the only one.The only representations of white culture further enforced the concept of white privilege.

Completely lacking were John Steinbeck’s field workers, Tom Wolfe’s cultural reportage of surf culture and the LSD 60s counter-culture, Po Bronson’s brilliant reporting of the Internet revolution, Christopher Isherwood’s documentation of the Nazi era Jewish diaspora, which created Hollywood. In other words — anything that would give students insight into the real world they were about to enter.

The history of Mexican and Native American persecution is part of the California story, but there is so much more, and so much brilliant writing students missed out on because of the need to highlight victim politics.

Incidentally, bullying of minorities is pronounced at this state university campus. I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that multiculturalism has been so embraced by the faculty that the poor, working class and lower middle class “non-minority” students who sit in class, and are told over and over that they are the root of all evil, lash back in frustration. They cannot speak up in class, so feeling marginalized themselves, bully in private. This is no excuse for bullying — we are all responsible for our own behavior.

 

I was thrilled to see this new lit mag describing itself in Poets & Writers as pursuing an agenda of publishing gritty urban stories.  Refreshingly free of political correctness and the strictures academic hot house, it’s even run by people with day jobs in the real world — imagine that!

I love Curbside Splendor. The founder, Victor David Giron is the son of Hispanic immigrants who doesn’t wallow in identity politics and actually works in the business world.

I have almost despaired of university literary journals – I can feel the boredom of the great plains and the drudgery of academic work through every line.  Where did the art of engagement go? These lit mags, coming from rural academic settings, leave unexplored the ordinary working lives of city dwellers. I find myself skimming them and latching on to the two or three stories out of perhaps thirty that cover the urban ground I crave.

“Curb” stories, poems, and short shorts are punchy, direct, often hyperbolic – reflecting the mind-set and communication style of city life.

I learned of “Curb” the week after I found out Open City, which professed a similar mission, was shutting down. I am pleased to say that “Curb” is a much better journal, and more closely adheres to it’s urban mission statement.  To me it harks back to the original “underground” literary scene of New York in the 1980s – publications like “Between C & D” writers like Luc Sante.

As we all know, for at least the past twenty years New York has been all but unaffordable for the non-trusted-funded writer. The scene is dominated by upper middle class young people who attended private schools, and wealthy immigrants. What have they to teach me?

Most of  “Curb” is written by Chicago-area people who have been out in the world and done a few things. My favorites: I’m not a poetry person, but I loved all the poetry – what does that tell you? Raw, visceral, direct, takes you by the collar and shakes you up.

Favorite stories: Ben Tanzer’s “Apply Some Pressure” about a bachelor party gone awry.

Short Story First Prize-Winner Brandon Jennings’ “Doc the Fifth” takes us to the wars and back. (OK – this author is in a Phd program but I won’t hold that against him – he’s been somewhere.)

Martini Hackert’s “Letters to Mama” – the vacuum lack of mother love through letters from inside.

The only weaknesses – a couple of the “multicultural” stories lack that edge, lack exciting language, and seem to want to teach us a social studies lesson.  Please note: being Indian or of non-Anglo background isn’t a story, it’s a situation. Please don’t include “international” narratives unless they’re as strong as the rest of the material.

www.curbsidesplendor.com

Read an interview with the press’s founder here:

http://www.orangealert.net/node/837

Trauma and shame can rip your tongue out. Decades ago, my friend and fellow writer, who goes by the alias  Stella Marr, was a nineteen year old sophomore at Barnard, estranged from her family and academic funding, when violently abducted into the underworld of prostitution.

It took her over a decade to get out of the life, and at least another to begin articulating her story. She finds herself at odds with the brand of feminist sex-workers who find the career empowering; her experience was anything but: 

“It was like I died after being smashed into a million tiny pieces sharp as broken glass. Then someone glued my body back together but inside I was a ghost. I became a completely different being. I felt like I’d been turned into something subhuman, and I could never turn back, that there was no chance I’d be accepted in the ‘civilian’ world. I’d become a hooker.”

To read the entire interview, and about her controversy and reconcilation with her fellow industry veterans, follow this link:

http://usedfurniturereview.com/2011/04/14/talking-with-women-stella-marr/

 

THE HUFFINGTON POST

 

 

This week I write in The Friendship Blog, The Huffington Post and Psychology Today on the social strains between Moms and non-Moms, asking, Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? The post was prompted after reading Dr. Irene Levine’s excellent book, Best Friends Forever, Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend. 

 

Guest Post – The Mother Divide: Friends with children and friends without

When I was growing up in the 70s, the progressive view held that a person could live a rich, rewarding life full of close bonds, even if she didn’t have kids. On prime-time Saturday nights, Mary and Rhoda in their studio singles apartments, Bob and Emily in their Chicago high rise mingled happily with friends and co-workers who were parents, and were accepted as equals despite their childless status.

I am an unintentionally childless woman, and I have grown up to a rich and rewarding life, with one caveat: I wasn’t prepared for the social stigma and isolation of living as a non-Mom in the midst of the biggest baby boom since World War II.

My suburban childhood friends began having children in their mid-twenties. I lived in New York City, and on weekends home I was more than willing to celebrate their family lives. But as the years rolled on, and I failed to produce children of my own, I was gradually excluded. I was invited to their first child’s christening, not the second’s. They were always taking the kids to see Grandma, or to another child’s birthday party; mere friends were bumped off their social radar screens. The family-both nuclear and extended-closed ranks, excluding outsiders.

Worse, when my city girlfriends started having babies and did include me, I was reduced to the role of handmaiden, exactly as if I were just another of their housekeepers, secretaries, or nannies. Only unlike the other members of their support staff, I wasn’t on salary. It was painful when some of my friendships with Moms ended, but at a distance of ten years, I see this as inevitable. Parents need an enormous amount of practical and emotional support, but are no longer in a position to provide what they demand.

If you’re happy being a planet orbiting around someone else’s sun, good for you. But I find one-sided friendships as rewarding as unrequited love affairs, and as healthy. To me friendship is like a Siamese twin: the life blood must circulate through both bodies. When the spirit of one twin departs, the furiously working heart of the surviving twin cannot do all the work of keeping the other half alive; the joint life-force dies.

 

I’m not alone in noting the effects of the Great Mother Divide. In her 2009 book, Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found (winner of the 2010 Hope Award for Best Book from RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association) Pamela Tsigdinos recounts a problematic lunch with a friend who went on to have three children while the author remained childless, despite extensive fertility treatments. After admitting her alienation at an exclusively child-centered chat, her Mom-friend asked, “Are you telling me I have to edit out large chunks of my life from now on when we talk?”
Tsigdinos suggested, “Let’s just try to pattern-match our conversation a bit.”

 

Despite vows to try to keep their connection afloat, Tsigdinos and her Mom friends continued to drift apart. “Phone calls became less regular. The urgency to schedule visits evaporated. “They didn’t know how to relate to me.” She and her husband grew “accustomed to broken plans or being put on the bench because the needs of our family and friends’ kids, naturally, came first.”

Tsigdinos’s solution to “the mother divide” was creating her own international community of non-Mom friends through her blog, Coming2Terms. “We don’t have to explain ourselves; we just fundamentally get each other. My story is her story and her story is my story and collectively we’re writing the sequel. I hear from women in Finland, Rhode Island, Australia, Oklahoma, Ireland, Canada, and in my own back yard. New friendships are born.”

 

Therapist Stephanie Baffone counsels women who exit the fertility treatment maze empty handed into a world of mothers. “Finding a way to negotiate friendships in the face of the ‘great divide’ is crucial. When friends cross over to join the ranks of motherhood, and the infertile patient is left behind to languish alone on the sidelines, friendships often become strained. Bad enough our bodies have levied against us the ultimate betrayal, but it goes from insult to injury when friendships reach this fork in the road, and the Moms saunter down a road without a backward glance.”

 

Baffone herself wound up childless after failed fertility treatments, and personally closed “the mother divide” by plunging into the lives of her family and friends. “Once I was able to accept that I probably would never be a Mom myself, I began to look for ways I could be proactive in closing the gap, which included regular family dinners, holiday scavenger hunts. It’s been so long since I struggled with friendships, it’s hard for me to tap into that part of my life now.”

 

But Baffone stresses that this is simply what worked for her, not a one-size fits all solution. Tsigdinos hasn’t given up on friendships with Moms, but recently noted on her blog, “The gap isn’t easy to bridge. It requires commitment by both parties, and not always being asked to accommodate the mom life.”
Because we childless are a minority, social etiquette hardly gives us a thought. My friend Yvonne relates,

“My husband and I were honored to be invited to the home of a co-worker. But my colleague was so besotted with her infant son, so completely absorbed by him during the entirety of our visit with the most embarrassing display of non-inclusive public displays of affection (PDA), I wondered why they had us over at all.”
While co-hosting a party in honor of my 90-year old aunt, a Mom immediately handed me her child’s computer and commanded me to read a book report and ten page “short” story. Why she felt it appropriate to ask me to take 20 minutes away from entertaining my guests to read anything off of a computer is beyond me, but she was blissfully unaware that this social event wasn’t about her child.

So how can parents tell when enough kid-focus is enough? Says Pamela Tsigdinos: “When you see their eyes glaze over.”

   
http://www.thefriendshipblog.com/blog/guest-post-mother-divide-friends-children-and-friends-without#comment-2495

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/irene-s-levine/guest-post—childlessnes_b_745125.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-friendship-doctor/201010/guest-post-friendship-and-childlessness-the-mother-divide/comments

  

In Backspace’s STET! column, I ask:

Can a Writer NOT Embrace Social Media? 

My name is Christina. I’m a published writer and a blogophobic. I’m also Facebook-averse and Twitter-terrified.

I’m a long form writer, I subscribe to egghead foreign affairs journals and ten thousand words is about the right length for me to read about or explain a complex issue like the financial crisis or the AIG bailout. I used to be a research analyst, author of in-depth executive white papers, and find that the quick take on an issue is usually a dumb take.

I don’t like chatting in public, I’m paranoid about people spying on me and listening in. When I’m on Facebook I feel like I’m stuck in a stalled New York City subway, a crowded elevator, or my high school cafeteria, looking at and listening to things I’d much rather block out.

 There’s a comic I love called Andy Kimler who does a nice riff on what he calls “Fritter.”

 I’m a person who’s always had a very few, tight friends with whom I communicate deeply and at length, and I hate small talk. Small talk and mean talk is what I find on many blogs and some online communities. (Yes, I understand the irony of me saying this online .)

The writers I hold in greatest esteem don’t even have web sites, let alone Twitter their every thought. I tend to lose respect for writers who promote themselves a lot online. If someone’s sending me a Twitter and FB update every day, I think: pathetic. Monthly is fine, but daily or weekly – unless they’re doing something phenomenal like plugging up the BP gusher – looks a bit desperate. 

 I don’t like airing my work and its aims too early – because it changes. It changes every day. Nor do I think it’s useful to share my, or read about another writers’ creative process. It’s a mystery, and I like to keep it that way.  I’d rather get more and better fiction from my favorite writers than an ode to their cat, or a riff on their back garden. I want the magic, not an explanation of how they did the trick.

An essayist and author I great admired — please note the past tense — has fallen on hard times, and blogs her every misery: an ugly divorce, homelessness, bankruptcy and just plain bad attitude. I wish she didn’t. I wish she could sit on these thoughts while she works some of her problems out, instead of spewing them into the world unprocessed.  I’m not her shrink, I’m her potential audience, a future buyer of her books, if she’d only stop blogging and get back to work.

 That said – does anyone know of any services that could help me with my online promotion? Because as much as I rant about it, I understand that it’s here to stay. 

http://backspacewriters.blogspot.com/2010/07/can-writer-not-embrace-social-media.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

http://backspacewriters.blogspot.com/2010/07/can-writer-not-embrace-social-media.html

This week in Drinking Diaries.com, I write about the bar to end all bars that cured me of  night-clubbing forever — at least in Connecticut.

          Freshman year in college, when Saturday Night Fever came to the tiny, provincial Pennsylvania town of  my small, private, pseudo-elite college, my friends contemptuously declared that no one could possibly look and act like the people in that film. It had to be a gross exaggeration.

They were wrong.

Down the Post Road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, since the age of fourteen I’d frequented a number of “theme” bars that catered to a disco clientele: a place where every table had a telephone, another with tiger-patterned rugs on the walls, a different one that sponsored dance contests.   These discos were full of young men with driven-back hair, polyester shirts and flared designer jeans with contrasting threads and platform shoes; girls with “precision” blow-dry hair cuts, glittering green eye shadow, boob-baring Danskins, and heels hanging off their wooden Candies.  

 Bars came in and out of fashion for mysterious reasons. Good Times Café in Norwalk was located in the bottom half of the back of a strip mall far down the Post Road, at least forty minutes from my home town, but which inexplicably became an instant hit with people from New Haven to Brooklyn, mixing everyone from Bronx street kids to millionaires sons from Greenwich.   

It was expensive, with a two dollar cover and $1.25 bar drinks, and you always had to wait in line, sometimes for hours, to get in. When you did, it was a nightmare of flashing lights, over-made up girls and scary men – the aura of Weimar Berlin with the added trauma of disco music blaring from speakers, or bad metal from a live band.

            I only went because my friends wanted to go, I never actually met anyone I liked there, but I loved to dance. The few times I was persuaded to go out with one of the Tom, Jerry, or Elvises who accosted me, the dates were duds. Men who looked glamorous under the mirror ball turned out to be: policemen, factory workers, rich college boys from Darien who all wanted a real girlfriend.

            I preferred to dance. I was there a minimum of three nights a week, every week, during the summer of 1979, arriving to stand in line as early as 7 p.m., and generally staying until it shut its doors to the strains of  My Sharona at 3.

Good Times wound down sometime in the mid-1980s and its former space is now a fitness club, but it lives on in cumulative memory. Searching in vain for an historical Google image, I came upon  Facebook page titled, “I Partied My Single Life away at Good Times Café in Norwalk, CT.”:

Thursday, 25-cent drinks. Wednesday-male stripper night. Closed Goodtimes and then it was off to Portchester NY to continue. Does anyone remember the X-rated hypnotist?

          Ah, yes, I remember it well.

One commentor’s experience best reflects my own: I was there so much, my parents had my mail forwarded. I remember such great times, and probably forgot even better ones.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47601104631&v=wall

                                                           www.drinkingdiaries.com/2010/07/19/

 

 

http://www.drinkingdiaries.com/2010/07/19/

This week I’m prominently quoted in the Society for Human Resource Management news magazine on the effectiveness – or not – of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

“Many of our fellow citizens with disabilities are unemployed … they want to work, and they can work,” said President George H.W. Bush when he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law on July 26, 1990.

Nearly 20 years later, President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 30, 2009, National Disability Employment Awareness Month proclamation, “We must seek to provide opportunities for individuals with disabilities. Only then can Americans with disabilities achieve full participation in the workforce and reach the height of their ambition.”

Yet for some the dream of meaningful employment remains as elusive in 2010 as it was in 1990. And there is some evidence that the ADA might have made things worse.

“Analysts have noted a decline in the employment rate of people with disabilities in recent years, and some evaluations of the ADA indicate that, rather than increasing employment, the Act may have reduced employment for those with disabilities,” noted the November 2008 edition of the Monthly Labor Review published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

“Although the ADA was intended to increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities by prohibiting discrimination in the workplace and by requiring employers to accommodate the needs of workers with disabilities, economic theory is more ambiguous,” the BLS publication continued. “The major argument economists have made is that if employers perceive the costs of accommodation to be high, they will refrain from hiring workers with disabilities.”

As of June 2010 less than 22 percent of people with disabilities of working age are employed—compared to 70 percent of people without disabilities—according to BLS statistics.

Individual Experiences Vary

In the late 1980s, while working as a public relations director for a well-known Wall Street firm, Christina Gombar was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS)—a condition characterized by incapacitating fatigue and problems with concentration and short-term memory.

“When I got sick I was given a choice of long-term disability or a severance package,” she told SHRM Online. “As I was young and didn’t think the illness would be permanent, I took a package, which I used as a springboard to a downscaled career. This was great for improving my health, but didn’t provide enough income or benefits.”

When Gombar was able to return to work full time she sought accommodations, such as the opportunity to work from home a couple of days a week, a “perk” that was resented by some of her peers: “people just didn’t return my e-mails or look at the work I sent in,” she said.

“No one seemed to ‘get it,’ ” Gombar said. “When people think ‘disabled,’ they think: blind or wheelchair, not rosy-cheeked and mobile. I looked healthy and I did stellar work so they couldn’t let go of the idea that I freelanced part time by choice, not necessity.”

Deborah Lewis, a warehouse manager at a big-box retailer, experienced a similar reaction when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic condition characterized by widespread muscle, ligament and tendon pain and fatigue. Though Lewis’ co-workers knew her to be a hard worker prior to her diagnosis, she said their attitudes changed after her physician placed restrictions on the type of work she could do as a result of “a condition they had never heard of and couldn’t see.”

“Some people actually told me I was putting on,” Lewis told SHRM Online. “I have been dealing with that attitude from a lot of people now for over 20 years. People won’t believe what they can’t see.”

Neither Gombar nor Lewis is employed today.

“Here is the issue for many disabled people: they may be well enough to work part time, but the ‘Catch 22’ is part-time work doesn’t come with the benefits they need, and people with chronic illnesses always have higher medical costs than the healthy,” Gombar explained. “A few private insurance companies allow disabled workers to earn something like 5 percent of their original salary on top of their disability pay. My policy forbids any earnings.”

“I was unable to find any kind of job for over four years,” Lewis said. “The little box on a lot of applications that asks if you have any limits or can you lift, bend, reach and so on, put me out of the race every time.” She now teaches art classes at her home-based studio.

Yet Gombar and Lewis want jobs.

“I would give anything in the world if I could work, but now it’s much more obvious that I am disabled,” Lewis said. “I can’t even get an application. No one wants to take a chance that something might happen to me and that I would sue them.”

“So many employers are missing out on well-educated people just because they don’t fit into their image of what an employee should look like, act like or sound like,” she added.

“I would love to go back to work … but no one wants to hire someone with a health/work history like mine,” Gombar said. “I would love to just freelance, but again—not enough income and no health benefits. I’m stuck.”

An Employer’s Experience

Susan Loynd, SPHR, director of human resources for Washington County Mental Health Services (WCMHS) in Montpelier, Vt., an agency that helps people with disabilities find employment, has first-hand experience employing people with disabilities. Many of WCMHS’s employees have cognitive impairments, developmental disabilities and mental disabilities and work as “client-staff” offering peer support and a positive role model for other clients.

“Our client-staff are some of our best employees because … they’ve been marginalized … they’ve been treated really badly,” Loynd said. “When we hire them they are so thrilled to be given an opportunity, to give back to their community, to be paying their way.”

“Employers need to see that people with mental disabilities are just like everyone else,” Loynd added. “People have these stereotypes about disability [but] until they work beside someone else they just don’t know.”

Loynd, a member of SHRM’s Workplace Diversity Special Expertise Panel, said the stigma surrounding mental illness is an ongoing barrier for some individuals. “People are fearful that someone is going to yell and scream and behave badly,” she told SHRM Online. Yet when crises occur in her community, Loynd said their clients are not usually the ones to blame. “It’s people who are not aware they are experiencing some sort of psychological issue,” she said. “Our clients have been in the system for many years so they know what triggers them and know what the resources are,” she explained, and are “usually in a better place to manage that kind of stress.”

Many Face Bias

Individuals with disabilities face the same biases today that they faced before the ADA was enacted, according to Mike Purkey, executive director of ICON Community Services, an employment service that specializes in placing people with disabilities. “We’ve come a long way baby, but we’re not there yet,” he told SHRM Online. 

The ADA was “a much needed piece of legislation,” Purkey said. “It made people a lot more aware of people with disabilities and the fact that they are in the workforce.” But he said that many employers lack understanding and hold preconceived notions about people with disabilities—whether they acknowledge them or not.

“I don’t think the employer wakes up in the morning and says ‘I am not going to hire people with disabilities because they are trouble,’” he said. “But [the ADA] scares businesses, who fear they will get sued.”

Kate Cullen, a human resource professional in the Washington, D.C., area, said ongoing education can help hiring managers overcome ignorance and risk-aversion, which she said are the biggest obstacles to the full employment and integration of people with disabilities into the life of an organization.

Competitive Advantage

Companies lauded for achieving high performance from large numbers of employees with cognitive disabilities—such as Walgreens and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital—started with a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve, and believed that even those with cognitive disabilities would be assets.

And, as SHRM has reported previously, they were right.

Such success stories can motivate other businesses to follow suit.

Nereida “Neddy” Perez, vice president for inclusion and diversity at National Grid, one of the world’s largest utility companies, said that in 2009 her company began making “a concentrated effort to establish strong external partnerships with professional associations interested in the advancement of people with disabilities.”

“We established two new employee resource groups (Veterans and Enabling),” Perez added, “to help increase awareness about career advancement opportunities within the company as well as help us identify areas where as a company we could eliminate obstacles/challenges.”

And the company anticipated the needs of applicants and employees with disabilities by completing a facilities audit and by developing a team approach to workplace accommodations “to ensure that we address all of the needs of the employee,” she explained.

But Perez, a member of SHRM’s Workplace Diversity Special Expertise Panel, said there was more her organization could do. “We will look for ways to connect our internship program to any organizations that provide interns who are disabled,” she told SHRM Online. The company plans to train managers on interviewing skills for working with people with disabilities as well.

Some Mostly Positive Experiences

Cynthia E. Kazalia, a placement specialist for New Directions Career Center, a Columbus, Ohio-based nonprofit organization that assists individuals in career transition, said her bone tumors might impact her range of motion and balance but they haven’t affected her career.

“Is it possible that I did not get a position over the course of my career due to the bone tumors?” she asked. “Sure. But an interviewer might have also turned me away because I laughed too loud or reminded them of their ex-wife.

“That said, I am not unenlightened about the existence of prejudice,” Kazalia told SHRM Online. “Once, on a summer job, an attorney told a joke that ended with, ‘That’s what happens when you hire the handicapped.’ A horrified look then crossed her face as she focused in on my presence. ‘Oh, Cindy,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The apology left me baffled until it occurred to me that she considered me disabled.”

“John,” a mid-fifties senior engineer with a congenital birth defect of the spine, said he has had no difficulties gaining employment throughout his career because people with his degree were in demand and employers were willing to “look past” his disability, which requires him to use braces, crutches or a wheelchair to get around. He requested anonymity for this article because he said his employer, a major defense contractor, “thinks they are doing what is best for me and I don’t want feelings to be hurt.”

“With my latest job change my employer has probably gone out of their way more than any other to make physical plant changes to make my life easier,” he noted. “However at the same time, in some areas they don’t seem to listen to my true needs and as a result money and time is wasted changing things that don’t need to be changed while ignoring things that do. This all seems to fall under the category of ‘I think I know what’s best for you and you don’t,’ ” he added.

Though his experiences have been largely positive, he too has faced a few challenges.

“For the most part my input and work efforts appear to be respected and appreciated,” he said. “However there are those who, for whatever reason, appear to be very uncomfortable with and around me.”

And in some cases, he said, he is treated like “the poster child” for those in the facility with disabilities.  Therefore I end up with trying to deal with the often uncomfortable task of speaking for all those in our facility with a disability.”

The Legacy of the ADA

Loynd said the ADA was a good start. “I think there are a number of folks who, but for the ADA, may not have had an opportunity at all,” she said.

Paul Miller, program director of the Green Mountain Workforce supported employment program at WCMHS, said that the ADA helps “keep bigger companies honest” and helps to create a dialogue: “It’s like having the big guy on the block standing behind you while you’re asking the kid next door for your $5 back.”

Perez said the ADA has “helped to raise awareness of the challenges faced by people with disabilities and establish guidelines that help businesses better understand what is expected from them.” But she said more work is needed, and that HR professionals “need to take the lead in addressing and eliminating the unconscious biases that exist in our work environments that sometimes impede the hiring of people with disabilities.”

This means holding leaders accountable for recruiting people with disabilities, she said, as well as challenging leaders’ perspectives about people with disabilities “the moment that someone makes an inappropriate comment or exhibits a behavior that is not professional.

“As HR professionals we have a responsibility to ensure that we effectively leverage the talents and skills of all employees,” Perez added. “If we see and know that there are barriers in the workplace that prevent an employee from being successful then we have a responsibility to address the issue.”

“Given the anticipated labor shortages that are coming up, look to a nontraditional workforce,” Loynd said. “Don’t back yourself into a corner when you are looking to hire people.

“Instead of putting an ad in the paper and talking to the first three people that walk through the door, widen the net,” Loynd said. “I guarantee if any one of these HR professionals called [WCMHS] and said ‘I need a couple of employees’ [agency staff members] would fall out of their chairs. We have a backlog of people waiting to work.”

An Open Mind

“Half the battle is having an open mind. Realize that you have many folks working for you who have mental health challenges right now,” Loynd said. “I work with these folks every day—there is no difference between folks that have a mental disability and anyone else.” 

“While we should not let disability be a barrier to employment, we also need to be mindful that we don’t hire an applicant ‘because’ of their disability,” Miller noted. “Applicants are not their diagnosis.

“We need to remind all staff and community members to think outside of the disability,” Miller said. “Ideally, we should be treating everyone the same. Everyone is important, but not necessarily unique or special.”

When Purkey meets with business leaders he sometimes asks them what a person with a disability looks like, or to name a person with a disability. He then uses examples such as former Sen. Bob Dole—whose war wounds left him with limited use of only one hand—and Sen. John McCain—who cannot lift his arms above his shoulders—to illustrate that people with disabilities are everywhere and can hold positions of power.

“If we stop looking at disability as something scary, abhorrent, we can look at it as ability,” he said. “We all have things we do really well and things we don’t.”

 http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/Diversity/Articles/Pages/HastheADAMadeaDifference.aspx

This week I’m quoted in Match.com’s Happen magazine on how I got over my committment-phobia.

“I am so counter-dependent, I am always like the elusive guy in a relationship, but I’m a woman,” says Christina Gombar. “I was the ultimate ‘heart of stone’ girl. I wasn’t promiscuous but I was always the remote, cold fish emotionally, with guys sending up their hearts on platters to me. I never understood it. But I think because I was a little tough, I attracted the opposite, emotionally needy guys.” It took a very persistent and communicative man to break down what Gombar’s self-preserving distancing strategies. “I’m ‘recovered’ but only because of my husband,” Gombar says.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.match.com/magazine/article0.aspx?articleid=11558

Therese Borchard struggled with manic depression during her college years, but went on to earn a master’s degree and establish a stellar career in journalism and book publishing.  But the hormonal shifts of motherhood, a geographic move, as well as the switch from sociable on-site office work to an isolated, home-bound freelance life, created a perfect storm of factors for mental illness to burgeon once more.

After a harrowing, months-long stay in an institution, she returned to home and children and went on to become the author of the hit blog, Beyond Blue on Belief.net, where she shares her continuing struggles with anxiety and manic depression, from her own particular Catholic perspective. This year she published her memoir, Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression and Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes, along with The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Guide, which offers concise techniques to help anyone living with a chronic illness get through the demands of a day.

I interviewed her for Working with Chronic Illness on how she manages to work, raise a family and keep her manic depression under control.

 CG: What are your biggest challenges in navigating your health condition, your job and your home life? 

TB: I suppose my biggest challenge is managing my health in a way that I can concentrate enough to meet my work deadlines. Fortunately, my schedule is flexible enough that I can write extra blog posts on a day where I’m feeling good, and bank them for the days my head isn’t good for anything. But I’m always nervous to commit to a meeting in person, because I don’t know how I will be feeling that day. So I fake it as best I can. I’ve had to do that a lot lately with the publicity efforts for my books: I’ve had to plaster a smile on my face and spit out nice sound bites all the while I am thinking that I wish I were dead.

 What is a typical work day like? 

I drop off the kids at school at 8, and usually work out for an hour. From 10 to 2 are my golden hours, where I try to get the posts written, or follow up on a story I was supposed to write for other magazines and newspapers I write for. If it’s sunny outside, I will take 20 minutes and eat outside, because it’s crucial that I get that sunshine and fresh air. By 2:30 I usually need to pick up the kids, start homework, get organized for lacrosse practice, etc. My work window is fairly small, so I try to get as much done as possible in the hours they are at school. And two days usually go to doctors’ appointments, blood work, and therapy.

What, if any accommodations do you/your employers make for yourself? (I know you have to stop yourself from overwork sometimes!)  

My editor, Holly, is very understanding that things like Twitter tutorials and SEO (search engine optimization) training can sometimes activate my inner energizer bunny that I want at rest. It’s difficult, especially in the blogosphere, not to make my writing my life and tweet all hours of the day. I need boundaries between work and home life. I try my best to shut off my computer when I’m not working, and to leave it closed during the weekend. I find that when I ignore my sensitivity to online chatter, that I will have to invest a lot of time into getting myself well again … so I try to be as prudent as possible. 

 Your blog is about coping with mental illness, so your employers knew of your condition. But your illness is “invisible” — you look super healthy, you run, etc. Did they really know what it entails, how hard it is, that it could ever become overwhelming?    

 That’s a good question. I think Holly is as understanding and empathetic as any editor could be. And the manager editor, Michael Kress, and the editor-in-chief, Ju-Don Roberts, too. They want me to publish the real stuff – like the video where I sobbed and said depression wasn’t always pretty – as that is what best speaks to people in the throes of depression. So if I can’t stay as up on current events or celebrity gossip as some of the other bloggers, they are fine with that. Sometimes I need to write pieces a few weeks in advance, to give myself a little time of rest in a depressive cycle. That’s not a great formula for search engine optimization—as you want to write on all the hottest search terms—but if the content is authentic and resonates with folks, that’s what is important.

 You started out with great qualifications, a masters degree, a magazine career and book publishing. After you had your kids and a breakdown (no connection there!) — you had to rebuild. Can you detail those challenges a bit? How did you negotiate with your prospective employer?

 All I can say is I had to take it in very small steps. I was unable to produce anything for about six months. Every time I sat down to write, it was awful. I would just cry and cry.

 So I relied on my great aunt’s advice to just take it very slow, one step at a time. I first signed up to be a writing tutor at the Naval Academy, because I wanted to see if I could concentrate for three hours a week. Getting through some of those first papers was more challenging than getting my masters degree. But, at the end of that, I had the confidence to ask an editor if I could have back my assignment of bi-weekly columns. Twice a week I had to come up with something coherent on paper. That was quite a challenge, too! But together, the tutoring and bi-weekly column, gave me the self-assurance to pursue “Beyond Blue,” the blog, and then later, “Beyond Blue,” the book.

 Negotiating is VERY hard, especially when you are feeling so unsure of yourself. What I did was to speak with anyone I could who might have information that would help me negotiate. I then pretended I was them … my friends who had just gone through this and came out with favorable working agreements. I told myself that it wasn’t me who would be doing the talking, but my friend, and that somehow made it easier.

 http://workingwithchronicillness.com/2010/06/not-just-surviving-but-thriving-while-living-with-depression/

http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/06/working-with-chronic-illness.html