A recent case out of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (Mammone v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., No. SJC-09609, May 12, 2006) provides a good example of how to manage an employee with a bona fide psychological disability -- focus on the conduct rather than the illness. The case involved Harvard's termination of a museum receptionist who suffered from bi-polar disorder. The employee worked for the facility for seven years with no problems, but began behaving oddly in August 2002. Among other things, he engaged in loud and animated conversations with museum patrons, established a website denouncing low pay at Harvard, and began singing and dancing at his reception station. He was hospitalized briefly, but returned to work a month later in East Indian dress and wearing necklaces, bracelets and rings. After his return, and while on duty, he made numerous loud phone calls and refused to meet with his supervisor, apparently referring to her as "evil". When he refused to leave the building, he was arrested, handcuffed and removed. After a six-month delay while he received short-term disability benefits, the University terminated him. Proving yet again that no good deed goes unpunished, Mammone then filed a charge and sued for disability discrimination.
Looking to both Massachusetts and federal disability law, the court noted that nothing in the Massachusetts law suggested that a lower standard of conduct should apply to handicapped employees vice employees without a disability. Examining a specific case involving drunken behavior by an alcoholic employee of an airline, the court refused to distinguish between misconduct due to alcoholism and misconduct due to mental illness. In other words, an employer is not required to "accommodate" a disabled employee by altering the fundamental conduct standards of the workplace. The dissent misses this key point, and opens the door to a completely unmanageable workforce, by trying to save the case noting that a "reasonable" jury could conclude that the conduct was not egregious because it was the result of mental illness. While I have no doubt a jury might be sympathetic to the plaintiff in this case, it's ridiculous (I almost said "crazy") to require an employer to accommodate any type of behavior in the workplace because the employee has a psychiatric condition. Such a holding would require that the employer treat psychiatrically impaired employees better than nondisabled employees, a concept that is completely incompatible with discrimination law.
Contrast this case with the earlier-referenced 9th Circuit case out of California ("Who's That Knocking On My Door?"), where the employer focused on the psychiatric condition as a basis for its employment decision and paid for it .