I still remember how mortified I felt the day I perched across from my boss, the head of editorial at one of the Bay Area’s most ubiquitous Big Tech companies, on his stiff red office couch.
With sweaty palms and trembling knees, I asked him to grant me a one-month medical leave because my depression had become unbearable.
“But…what does that mean?” he asked. “Can you tell me more?”
I struggled to find the words. “It’s hard to explain,” I eventually said. “I just don’t have any energy. To do anything. I’m drained all the time, physically. And nothing feels good to me. I hate myself. I only get out of bed to come to work.”
I could tell my boss was just trying to approach an unfamiliar situation with curiosity and compassion. He granted my leave without hesitation and found someone else on our team to cover for me. Nevertheless, I exited his office humiliated.
My mental illness had reached a crescendo
A few months earlier, in the fall of 2016, I’d returned home to San Francisco after a disastrous stint in Panama, where I’d spent the past year trying to open a journalism school in a jungle eco-community. I was 31 years old and had worked as an editor in a high-octane newsroom for most of my adult life, and I thought I could outrun my blossoming depression by “chasing my bliss” to the equator.
Instead, my mental illness reached a crescendo, and I wound up on a one-way flight back to the States at the advice of a kind stranger on the other end of a suicide hotline.
Unemployed, unraveling, and uninsured, I enrolled in a state-sponsored health plan to begin treating my condition in earnest. But in-network mental health care for my crappy insurance amounted to long waits and limited providers. I needed a job that afforded me better coverage.
During a rare spurt of motivation, I stumbled upon a listing for an internal news editor on the communications team at one of Silicon Valley’s most dominant tech empires, a company whose name had become a verb. Its top-tier employee benefits — including the holy grail of health insurance — had been common knowledge since its inception. In an extraordinary collision of luck and timing, I managed to land the role.
Big Tech in the mid-2010s was a fever dream of professional opulence. I immediately found a therapist and started on yet another medication regimen. Yet my depression persisted.
I trudged through the dazzling campus in a daze, passing volleyball courts and sipping iced tea from the custom boba bar, wanting to die. I zoned out during team lunches, hands shaking from my meds, trying not to spill soup down my shirt as my colleagues recounted their vibrant weekends. Since I’m a good enough faker to blend in, nobody ever noticed I wasn’t okay.
The dissonance was not lost on me: In one of the most resource-rich environments on the planet, I couldn’t find a way to alleviate my pain. Having access to everything and finding relief in nothing sent me further into a vortex of guilt and shame.
At work, I channeled every shred of my meager cognitive energy into completing my tasks satisfactorily, and to anyone else, it seemed like I was doing just fine in my new role. The rest of the time, I hid under the covers or drank to the point of blacking out — the two fastest shortcuts to escaping my own mind.
I took a medical leave, and then another
My first medical leave, granted during that awkward exchange on my boss’s red couch, took place in an outpatient program at a local psychiatric hospital.
Over the course of several group therapy sessions, I learned that two of the other people in the program had the same employer as me. They were battling their own mental health issues, their gold-plated insurance cards yielding similar benefits as mine.
As we navigated our respective darkness, we still managed to recognize our relative privilege. How did suffering people who didn’t have fancy health insurance access the care they, too, so desperately needed?
The outpatient program didn’t end up helping me much. Neither did transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy, which my health insurance covered, or ketamine infusions, which I paid for out of pocket but received on company time.
After a year and a half of trudging through life at bare minimum, I decided to try residential rehab. I found a facility that took Big Tech health insurance and off I went.
Against all odds, rehab ended up being the antidote I needed. Two years flattened by severe depression meant drugs and alcohol had become my favorite coping mechanism outside of languishing in bed. The residential rehab program took me down avenues toward the root of my illness that I’d never before traversed.
And with a clean and sober mind, for the first time in my adult life, I had a fighting chance of treating my condition in earnest.
Now, I’m open about my struggles
When I returned to work, I decided I no longer wanted to keep my mental illness a secret. I felt better than I had in years, maybe ever. Tentatively embracing the newfound confidence that comes with self-love and sobriety, I started talking to my colleagues about what I’d been through.
It started small: a walk between meetings, a candid conversation over afternoon coffee. The more I shared, the more I realized just how common my story was.
My coworkers began disclosing every flavor of the same topic to me, confiding their own persistent depression or problematic drinking, or asking for advice about supporting a loved one with similar challenges. I helped a few folks navigate our generous-but-labyrinthine benefits program so they could access the same resources that helped me. I even worked with our People Operations department to ensure offsite events would be inclusive of non-drinkers.
That was seven years ago, and I’ve remained sober and depression-free ever since. I even served as a spokesperson for the tech company’s “recovery month” campaign. When I left my full-time job in 2021 for new adventures as a journalist, writer, and mental health advocate, discourse around these issues among my colleagues had begun to bubble to the surface more.
I know every company is different. I know I got unfathomably lucky. I also know, now, that while I might have concealed my condition at first, I wasn’t alone in my suffering. The more these conversations come to the forefront, the better off we all are.
Every once in a while, I still worry that disclosing my struggles so candidly might have negative repercussions. But I’m determined to never return to that dark, lonely place, and it wasn’t until I stopped hiding that I started to see the light.
Carly Schwartz is a San Francisco-based author whose new memoir, I’ll Try Anything Twice, chronicles her recovery adventures. She served as editor-in-chief of the SF Examiner and founding editor of HuffPost’s SF bureau, runs a workshop series focused on storytelling for healing, and yammers about the writing process on Substack.
Have you struggled with mental health while working a demanding job? Contact this editor, Debbie Strong, at [email protected].
