You Don’t Have to Choose Between Your Mental Health and Your Job

May is Mental Health Awareness Month — a time to reduce stigma, support those who are struggling, and make sure people know that the law is on their side.

One in five American adults lives with a mental health condition. Many of them are in the workforce — managing depression through carefully scheduled therapy appointments, navigating anxiety in open-plan offices, living with PTSD while commuting to jobs that require them to hold it together for eight hours a day. They are performing. They are contributing. And many of them are doing all of it without asking for the legal protections they are entitled to — because they are afraid of what happens when they do.

That fear is understandable. It is also, in many cases, the thing that allows employers to get away with illegal conduct. This post is about what the law actually requires, what disclosure actually means, and what to do when your employer uses your mental health against you.

Mental Health Conditions Are Disabilities Under the Law

Start here, because this surprises people more than it should. Anxiety disorders, major depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, OCD, and schizophrenia are all disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. So are panic disorder, ADHD, and many other psychiatric conditions that substantially limit one or more major life activities — including concentrating, sleeping, regulating emotions, interacting with others, and caring for oneself.

The standard is not as high as most people assume. Your condition does not need to be severe or permanent to qualify. It qualifies if it makes major life activities more difficult, uncomfortable, or time-consuming compared to how most people perform them. An employee who successfully manages her depression through medication and therapy is still considered to have a disability — the effort required to manage it is part of the picture.

Under both the New York State Human Rights Law (NYSHRL) and the New York City Human Rights Law (NYCHRL), the definition is, if anything, broader still. The NYSHRL covers all New York employers regardless of size. The NYCHRL, which applies to NYC employers with four or more employees, requires courts to interpret its protections as broadly as possible. Neither law requires you to clear the federal ADA threshold before your condition is legally recognized.

The bottom line: if you have a mental health condition that affects how you function at work, there is a strong chance you are a protected employee — whether your employer knows it or not.

The Disclosure Dilemma: What You Have to Tell Your Employer — and What You Don’t

This is the question at the center of every mental health accommodation conversation, and it is the one most likely to keep employees from asking for help in the first place.

Here is the legal framework:

You do not have to disclose your diagnosis. The ADA does not require you to tell your employer what condition you have. You are required only to inform your employer that you have a medical condition and that you need an accommodation because of it. You can describe your condition in general terms — “an anxiety disorder,” “a psychiatric condition” — without naming it specifically.

Your employer can ask for documentation. Once you request an accommodation, your employer is permitted to ask for a letter from your healthcare provider confirming that you have a condition that requires accommodation and describing the functional limitations it creates. Your provider does not need to disclose your full diagnosis or treatment history — only enough to establish that the accommodation is medically supported.

Your employer cannot share what you tell them. Any medical information you provide in connection with an accommodation request is legally required to be kept confidential. It must be stored separately from your personnel file. It cannot be shared with supervisors, co-workers, or HR personnel who do not need to know. A manager who tells colleagues that an employee is in therapy, or who discusses a team member’s psychiatric condition in a meeting, has likely violated the law independently of anything else.

You control the timing. You are not required to disclose at the time of hiring. You can request an accommodation at any point during your employment. Many employees wait until a situation arises — a performance issue, a leave request, a conflict over schedule — before formally asking. The law protects you at whatever point you choose to ask.

The practical tension is real: you cannot receive an accommodation you have not requested, and requesting one requires some disclosure. The answer is to disclose the minimum necessary to support the request, in writing, and to document your employer’s response carefully from that point forward.

What Reasonable Accommodation for Mental Health Actually Looks Like

Accommodation for mental health conditions is not a special favor. It is a legal obligation — and for mental health specifically, it tends to be less operationally burdensome than employers claim.

Common examples include:

• Flexible scheduling — adjusted start and end times, or the ability to take time off for therapy appointments without using all available leave
• Remote work or hybrid arrangements — particularly where an open-plan office, commute, or in-person interaction triggers symptoms; the pandemic permanently changed what employers can claim as “undue hardship” here
• Modified break schedules — additional short breaks to manage anxiety, take medication, or decompress during high-stress periods
• A quieter workspace — reduced noise or sensory stimulation for employees with conditions affecting concentration
• Adjusted performance expectations during a crisis period — a temporary modification of deadlines or workload while symptoms are acute
• Leave — beyond what FMLA provides, as a standalone ADA accommodation when medical leave is necessary and does not constitute undue hardship
• Reassignment — to a vacant position that the employee can perform if the current role cannot be accommodated

The employer gets to choose which accommodation to provide — but only from among effective options. An employer cannot offer an accommodation so inadequate that it does not actually address the limitation, and then claim compliance.

Remote Work Is Now a Harder Request to Deny

Before 2020, employers routinely denied remote work as an accommodation by claiming that in-person attendance was an essential job function. For many of those jobs, the pandemic proved that argument false. Employees worked from home for months or years, performed their jobs effectively, and maintained the same output.

The EEOC has made clear that if a job’s essential functions can be performed remotely, telework must be seriously considered as a reasonable accommodation. An employer who allowed an employee to work from home during the pandemic — and then denied a post-pandemic request for remote work as a mental health accommodation — faces a much harder undue hardship argument than they would have in 2019.

This shift has particular significance for employees with anxiety, PTSD, agoraphobia, and other conditions that are materially worsened by commuting, open offices, or densely populated workplaces. If your employer denied remote work and you believe it was denial of a reasonable accommodation, the landscape has changed in your favor.

The Interactive Process: Your Employer Must Engage

Once you request an accommodation, your employer cannot simply say no. Both the ADA and New York law require a genuine, good-faith interactive process — an actual exchange of information to understand your needs and explore what is possible.

Under the NYCHRL, this is called cooperative dialogue, and the failure to engage in it is itself a legal violation, separate from and in addition to any underlying discrimination claim. Your employer must ask questions, consider options, and document the process. A non-response, a form letter denial, or a manager saying “we don’t do that here” is not a cooperative dialogue.

The interactive process also continues. If an accommodation stops working, or your condition changes, you have the right to return to the table and request a revised accommodation.

The Performance Management Trap

This is the pattern we see most often in mental health discrimination cases, and it is the one most employees don’t recognize until it is too late.

It goes like this: an employee discloses a mental health condition or requests an accommodation. Shortly afterward, the employer begins building a paper file — write-ups for things that were never documented before, sudden performance improvement plans, negative reviews from a supervisor who previously gave satisfactory ratings, attendance write-ups that ignore the employee’s documented medical needs. The employer never says “we are doing this because of your mental health condition.” They say they are doing it because of performance. By the time the employee is terminated, there is a file that looks, on its face, like a legitimate basis for the decision.

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. And it is illegal — both as disability discrimination and as retaliation for requesting accommodation.

The legal protection against retaliation is independent of the underlying accommodation request. An employer cannot take adverse action against you because you asked for help. If the timeline of your performance management starts from the date of your disclosure or accommodation request, that timing is evidence. Documenting it contemporaneously — dates, what happened, what was said, what changed — is critical.

If you are on a PIP you did not see coming, receiving write-ups for conduct that was previously acceptable, or suddenly being managed out of a role you held without incident before disclosing a mental health condition, that pattern has a name. Get legal advice before you sign anything.

The FMLA: A Parallel Track

The Family and Medical Leave Act provides up to 12 weeks of job-protected, unpaid leave per year for serious health conditions — including mental health conditions that require inpatient care or continuing treatment. FMLA applies to employers with 50 or more employees and covers employees who have worked at least 12 months and 1,250 hours.

FMLA leave and ADA accommodation are separate legal frameworks that often work together. FMLA can cover intensive treatment periods, hospitalizations, or periods when symptoms are acute enough that work is not possible. ADA accommodation covers the ongoing adjustments that allow you to continue working. You can be eligible for both at the same time.

Importantly, FMLA leave can also be taken intermittently — in individual days or even hours — for a serious mental health condition. An employer who disciplines or terminates an employee for absences that qualified as FMLA leave has violated the law. And an employer who retaliates against an employee for requesting or taking FMLA leave has committed an independent violation.

Under New York law, the New York Paid Family Leave Law and short-term disability benefits provide additional coverage that can supplement FMLA, offering partial income replacement during a qualifying leave period.

What You Should Do

Put your accommodation request in writing. State that you have a medical condition, describe the functional limitation in general terms, and specify what accommodation you are requesting. Keep a copy of everything you send and everything you receive.

Provide the minimum documentation necessary. Your provider’s letter should confirm that you have a condition requiring accommodation and describe what you need — not hand over your treatment history.

Document the employer’s response — and any change in treatment. If write-ups start appearing, if your review scores drop, if your workload shifts in ways that feel punitive — write it down. Date it. Keep it somewhere outside your work systems.

Do not resign without legal advice. Constructive discharge — being pushed out through conditions made so intolerable that resignation was the only option — is treated as a termination under the law. If your workplace has become untenable since you disclosed your condition, that is a fact pattern worth discussing with an attorney before you leave.

Know your deadlines. Under the NYSHRL, as of February 2024, you have three years to file a complaint for all discrimination claims. Under the NYCHRL, you have three years to file a lawsuit in court. Under the ADA, you have 300 days to file with the EEOC. The clock starts when the violation occurs — not when you decide you have had enough.

The Stigma Is Theirs to Own. The Rights Are Yours.

Asking for a mental health accommodation at work is not a weakness. It is a legal right — the same right that entitles a diabetic employee to keep glucose tablets at her desk, or an employee with a back injury to use a standing workstation. The law does not grade disabilities by how visible they are or how much sympathy they attract.

At Dolce Law PLLC, we represent employees on the plaintiff’s side — including workers who have been discriminated against, denied accommodation, or retaliated against because of a mental health condition. We handle most cases on a contingency fee basis, meaning you owe us nothing unless we recover for you.

If something changed at work after you disclosed a mental health condition or asked for help, let’s talk about what the law can do for you.