Ask HN: I was let go for writing about my depression. What should I do?

> and made them feel unsafe

If a person makes a direct threat then yes, obviously the employer can take action to protect their work force.

But why do you think of violence when we're talking about mental illness? The vast majority of violent crime is committed by people who do not have a mental illness.

Your comment is stigmatizing and ignorant. OP is male. You do not seem to be askin about the risk of violence because of his maleness even though most violent crime is commited by men.

About one in six people over 16 have a significant mental health problem. The US has a population of hundreds of million people over sixteen - let's say 250million. That gives about 41 million people with a significant mental illness. Each year about 16,000 people are murdered in US, so even if every single murder was committed by someone with a mental illness you still have 41million (minus 16,000) safe people who have a mental health problem. But research suggests that only about 10% of mirder is committed by someone with a mental illness.

[1] using current UK terminology

I agree with this. All of the comments about a potential claim OP has against the company assume that he was actually an employee. Perhaps OP can elaborate as to whether he was an employee or not? If he was an independent contractor, then it's a completely different story. Also, by publicly shaming the company, OP also opens himself up for a defamation lawsuit.

>Your comment is stigmatizing and ignorant. OP is male. You do not seem to be askin about the risk of violence because of his maleness even though most violent crime is commited by men.

I wrote a big, long diatribe about how wrong it was of you to inject a weird sexism-hued gender argument, but I erased it.

I don't believe that asking a question is ever stigmatizing if done in good faith, and my question (which, by the way, is distinct from a comment) is most certainly in good faith. My question may certainly have been ignorant, but the removal of such ignorance is exactly the goal of my question! I ask to become wiser, I promise.

Simply put : I didn't ask about his gender because it wasn't his gender which alienated me towards him. The product of his authorship; the blog post and the details therein, is what alienated me towards him.

The blog post, with what dangerously little knowledge of psychology I have, made me feel as if it were written by a psychopath. I don't care to state specific reasons publicly. Psychopaths have a larger incidence of impulsive/threatening/amoral behaviors by definition than so-called 'normal' behaviors. That's the reason why I feel compelled to think of violence.

My jump towards violence wasn't as vague as 'mentally ill', but rather specifically towards descriptions of activities within that blog post which I categorized mentally as psychopathic.

One assumes that his co-workers were untrained in mental health disciplines, just as I am. I don't think that it is unreasonable to assume that upon reading the post they may have felt the same way as I did.

Let me distill the actual question for you, so that you can answer the right one this time.

The question was : "If an employee sues for wrongful termination after writing a blog post which has the effect of alienating people towards him, wouldn't it be quite easy to have that workforce testify that "X blog post made me feel Y.", and if so doesn't this pose a problem for OP and his plans to sue?"

The assumption that question falls upon is that I'm not the only person who was alienated by the blog post, and I would assume that if the author was actually an acquaintance that the effect would be stronger.

The question was asked as a hypothetical 'what-if' for possible motives behind the termination; a piece of the overall brainstorming session behind OPs lawsuit, and also a chance for me to better understand how laws work regarding such things. Please use a friendlier tone if you'd care to educate others. I feel that your passion for finding fair treatment for the ill is preventing you from reading what I wrote and considering my actual question without turning into a mouthpiece and discarding the question entirely.