Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

What is the difference between being schizophrenic and having the "opinion" that Satan speaks to you through your neighbor's cat?

Mental illness is defined by what a person feels and believes.

What you feel and believe is subjective but you can objectively establish that a particular cluster of subjective feelings and beliefs is abnormal vis-a-vis a populate.

Then when you ask people the same questions and their cluster of responses fits the abnormal definition you can objectively say that they have a mental illness.

The objectivity does not come from the doctor observations or patient self-survey, it comes from the study that created the questions and proved that a certain score or cluster of responses is statistically abnormal.

This is really the only issue I have. Maybe your manager sucked, I don't know. But this specific story is absolutely the opposite. He put himself out on the line (as you say) and was honest with you. Typical folks would simply not talk to you whatsoever, but have the same reasoning.

Maybe I'm strange, but I'd far prefer the latter.

Story time. My best hire I've made was an employee with a speech impediment. This job was for a night shift as a sysadmin/support role, and that required answering the phones at 2am when customers called. Customers don't call at 2am to have a friendly chat - so those calls typically were high stress, and it really caused his speech to falter quite a bit.

I could have easily simply bounced him on the phone interview, since we were a tiny startup at the time and one wrong hire had the potential to sink us. I had other livelihoods to think of - not just the "legal" situation.

So what I did was I asked the guy back for a second informal interview and laid my cards out on the table. He could have gotten up right then, left, and immediately sued me. But he didn't - we had a productive talk about it, and due to that talk (and other self-starting qualities he had shown) he got the job.

I've now worked with him for over 10 years, through thick and thin and switching companies.

If I had followed your advice here - as the hiring manager I would have simply round-filed the resume due to the potential issues, and went on with my day. I took the risk, and it worked out. I don't believe what I did should have been punishable by death of my company - but it absolutely was if that potential hire had been ethically challenged. I also started the career of someone who was having challenges finding work elsewhere due to "unknown reasons" - aka people seeing his impairment and silently crossing him off the candidate list. Due to the insane legal framework around this stuff, very few companies will take risks like I did any longer.

The disease itself is a delusion, regarding microscopic fibers in the skin. Sufficiently impressionable people simply hear about it, convince themselves that they have it, then they go on to try to convince others that it is a physical ailment rather than a mental illness.

If you are politically incorrect enough to classify religions as mental illnesses, many of those appear to be contagious as well.

But on a smaller scale, workplace morale is definitely infectious. If someone is having a particularly stressful day, they may be rude to someone else, who then feels worse as a result, and may propagate that to yet another co-worker. Of particular interest is that such transmission need not take place in person. A person with a common cold could work from home to keep everyone else from catching it, but someone with malaise or anxiety could transmit that via any medium that can include emotional undertone, such as a voice or video call.