“Disclosure is a very personal decision—it’s not something anyone should feel forced or pressured into,” said Sarah E. Victor, PhD, an assistant professor at Texas Tech University. It’s important to consider the potential costs and benefits of disclosing and not to do it until you feel comfortable doing so, she said.
Issues of timing and safety are likewise of paramount importance, added Victor, who studies stigma, nonsuicidal self-injury, and suicide. For example, many people prefer to feel out the climate of their organization before making this decision, and others wait until they are in positions of relative authority so they feel more professionally secure. Disclosure is also a matter of degree, said Victor: You may decide to start by talking first with a colleague whom you trust and build slowly from there, for example.
In her own case, Victor decided to tell colleagues about her experiences with mental illness once she had the overall sense that they’d probably be receptive to this sharing. “I thought, ‘OK, now I have my feet under me some, and I have a sense of how people generally seem to talk about these issues. I feel confident that people are going to respond in an OK way, and I’m willing to take that risk.’”
[Related: Psychologists with mental health conditions may face discrimination in their own field]
Maya Nauphal, a graduate student at Boston University, said that as she has grown in confidence and academic success, she feels better able to tackle these issues with colleagues. “Unfortunately, I think at this point there is a direct relationship between access to power within the field and being comfortable self-disclosing and encouraging others to have these conversations, too.”
If you do choose to disclose, it can carry multiple benefits, Victor added. She was gratified to find that colleagues were very supportive, but more than that, she said, “I don’t have to carry around this weight anymore—that there’s this part of my experiences that I don’t get to share.”
Andrew Devendorf, an intern at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle who has studied and written extensively about mental health stigma in the field, said he is looking forward to the day when disclosing is not automatically labeled as “brave.”
“I think the implication of ‘brave’ implies that there is a problem, like you’re putting yourself at risk by sharing that part of yourself,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll get to the point where it’s not a big deal to have conversations about this.”
