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TESTIMONY OF ANDREW J. IMPARATO before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights I would like to thank Chairperson Berry, Vice Chairperson Reynoso, the other Commissioners and staff of the Commission, particularly Erik Brown, for inviting me to participate in this afternoon's panel. I am the general counsel and director of policy for the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent federal agency advising the President and the Congress on public policy issues affecting people with disabilities. Like the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, NCD has been charged by Congress to monitor and evaluate federal enforcement of ADA, and we are currently preparing an analysis of the effectiveness of federal enforcement, which will be completed in 1999. Interestingly for this panel, NCD will be hosting a public hearing next Friday, November 20, in Albany, New York, focused on the topic of federal policy affecting individuals with psychiatric disabilities. To the extent that we hear testimony that would be relevant to the Commission's work today, NCD will supplement the record with additional information within the 30 day window you have allotted for post-hearing submissions. Before coming to NCD in 1997, I served as a special assistant to Commissioner Paul Steven Miller at EEOC and worked with the other Commissioners' staff and the office of legal counsel staff at EEOC on several ADA enforcement guidance documents, including the guidance issued in March 1997 on ADA and people with psychiatric disabilities. I am proud to have worked with EEOC staff on the psychiatric disability guidance, which I believe is a clear, common sense document that applies well-established ADA principles in the context of employees with psychiatric disabilities. In the more than 20 months since the guidance was issued, I have conducted trainings for hundreds of managers, supervisors, human resources professionals, attorneys, employee advocates, and people with disabilities on the contents of the guidance. As a final point of personal background, I have for the last eight years been experiencing significant bouts of depression and hypomania that have led mental health professionals to conclude that I have a mood disorder known as bipolar disorder. It is largely because of my personal connection to the topic of today's panel that I have devoted my professional and personal energies to disability advocacy. When I first started looking for a job in Washington, D.C. back in 1993, I applied for a staff attorney position at a non-profit organization that did work on behalf of people with mental illness. I self-identified in my cover letter as a "mental health consumer," thinking that my experience with mental illness might be seen as an asset in the work the organization did. The attorney who was handling the search was concerned about what my statement meant, so he called one of my references to ascertain what she knew about my being a "mental health consumer." She referred him back to me, but he refrained from asking me directly to describe my condition. He ultimately decided to have me come down for an interview, and we went through the whole interview without my mental health coming up. At the end of the interview, I said, "I know you talked to one of my references about my mental health. Is there anything that I can answer?" At this point, the attorney who had committed the violation of Title I of ADA remained silent and the other lawyer conducting the interview said: "Well, is there anything that you want to tell us?" I proceeded to describe my experiences with dramatic mood swings and her first reaction was, "Oh, c'mon Andy, we all see a therapist, why is that relevant?" I went into more detail about how my mood swings affected my life and after a while, a lightbulb went off in her head and she said, "Oh, you're bipolar. Well, I know someone who's bipolar and she's really inappropriate at meetings. How do I know you're not going to be really inappropriate at meetings?" Needless to say, I did not get the job. I tell the story because it illustrates that, even among entities you would expect to know better, fears, myths and stereotypes about people with mental illness are alive and well. In a 1991 Harris poll, people in the general public were asked, "Are you very comfortable with..." people with a variety of disabilities. 59 percent of those surveyed answered that they were very comfortable with a person in a wheelchair. 47 percent of those surveyed answered they were very comfortable with a blind person. Yet, only 19 percent answered they were very comfortable with a person with mental illness. From my perspective, all of those numbers are probably higher than reality because lots of people don't want to admit, even to themselves, that they are not comfortable with a person with a disability. However, even in an inflated environment, only 19 percent of the respondents answered they were very comfortable with people with mental illness. Why? For one thing, people with serious mental illness in this and many other countries have a history of oppression and exclusion. We have been unable to mortgage to own property, to care for our children, or to decide for ourselves what treatment we wish or wish not to have. For years, it has been difficult for people with mental disabilities to get a drivers license, or to get a professional license, such as a license to practice law or medicine. Probably the largest cause of public discomfort with people with mental illness is the media. 87 percent of the American public say they get their information about mental illness from the media, according to a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study. This high percentage is troubling, given that media and film representations of people with mental illness concentrate totally disproportionately on violence. The attached cartoon from the Richmond Times-Dispatch is a good example of a violent image, in this case prompted by the issuance of EEOC's enforcement guidance. In the cartoon, a man with a briefcase identifying him as an EEOC employee tells a befuddled supervisor, "No, you may not ask a job applicant about a history of mental disabilities... That's discrimination." Standing next to the EEOC employee is the person with a mental disability, depicted wearing a hockey mask and carrying an axe like the movie character "Jason" from Friday the 13th horror films. From my perspective, people with psychiatric disabilities are one of the largest subpopulations in the disability community (my colleague Laura Mancuso will provide statistics). They are also among the most stigmatized, as the Harris poll figures demonstrate, and among the most marginalized. An example of this marginalization can be seen in the numerous articles about the psychiatric disability guidance from EEOC. Despite the fact that the guidance was about how to accommodate and treat fairly employees with psychiatric disabilities, the reporters typically did not talk to any person with a psychiatric disability to get their perspective on the guidance. I am attaching an analysis of the guidance that was prepared by my friend and colleague Claudia Center, Esq., a disability rights attorney with mental illness who understood the true value of the guidance. I would like to close with two quotes, one from a mental health professional, and one from a woman who experienced mental illness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both quotes address the importance of work for people with mental illness. The first appeared in a New York Times editorial prompted by EEOC's guidance, and it is from Peter D. Kramer, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Brown University:
Peter D. Kramer, "The Mentally Ill Deserve Job Protection," New York Times, May 6, 1997. The second quote is from the writer and artist Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?," The Forerunner (Oct. 1913). HOME | FAQs | NEWSROOM | SITE MAP | FEDERAL AGENCIES | RESOURCES |
