 talking to you guys about my experience with overcoming mental health hurdles at work. A little about me, I feel so fortunate that I've been able to turn my passion into a career. My passion is problem solving. I've loved puzzles and seeking out new information for as long as I can remember. I've been programming since high school and graduated with a degree in computer science in December 2013. For the past year I've been working as a front end developer for Olark Live Chat. I've listed my contact information here so if you feel like anything in my talk resonates with you or you just want a new connection don't hesitate to reach out to me. I have two rabbits and a cat who give me constant sources of smiles during my rough periods. I'm going to put them on screen while I'm talking about things that are hard for me to say. And now you'll see that my rabbits, Balashiks and Toby and my cat Theo are on the screen. I've lived with anxiety for as long as I can remember. For the most part it didn't really affect my life much until high school when I started experiencing panic attacks. My condition worsened through college incorporating a depression component and by my fourth year I was on prescribed medication and seeing a therapist once a week. These helped immensely but I barely made it to graduation. I spent much of my time either exhausted and unable to concentrate thanks to anxiety induced insomnia or too empty to interact with my surroundings let alone absorb knowledge. This was so strange to me as someone who had spent the majority of childhood with my nose in a book thirsty for new information. I was always a high functioning type A personality and now that part of myself had taken a big step back. Despite these struggles I somehow managed to land my dream job just after graduation. I excelled during the first six months of my new job. I soaked up information and through myself into implementing new features and fixing bugs. I made great work relationships and felt comfortable and well supported with my colleagues. I was living the life I had been dreaming of during those dark college days and then my medication stopped working. So this was my posting on a depression forum from June 2014 when I started noticing my mental health having a significant impact on my work and I'm just going to read that word for word. This is my first failed job out of college and I absolutely love the work I do as well as my colleagues. However I still feel useless and listless. All I have energy and motivation to do is sleep. I can easily sleep 18 plus hours a day. Some days I knock things out of the park. I make it to work, get tons done, help each other, help others, etc. Most days I feel like a waste of space. I'm in a mental space where I don't like myself at all. I don't feel good. I feel detached and empty. I spend the majority of what little energy I have, no will or interest in eating either, on trying my best to pretend that everything is fine. I don't want my colleagues to think that I don't like or care about my job. It's literally perfect. I don't like how little I've been able to accomplish lately. How can I have an honest and frank discussion with my superiors about my mental state and still have them trust me to get things done and value me as an employee? I'm feeling so lost here and this job is seriously the best thing I have in my life. What do I do? And I didn't get the response that I really wanted. The overwhelming response to this post was essentially, don't do it. You could get fired. Well, I did it anyway. After looking at LARC and determining that it is probably unlike other places that might let the stigma of mental illness affect their treatment of employees, I decided to approach one of our founders, Matt, who's here. I'm going to make him leave. There he is. I did this outside of any depressive episode, so I felt I had a handle on things and I felt comfortable talking about my struggles and somewhat past tense. This interaction set the precedent for all other experiences I had with sharing my obstacles with my colleagues. I brought it up somewhat casually as it's difficult to admit these kinds of problems to people when you are so used to internalizing them. I explained my anguish over my technical performance and how passionate I was about my job. Matt did not mention my performance at all. The conversation was quickly focused on my well-being and health and all our willingness to work with me during my both points. The title of this slide, you told your boss what, is inspired by my mother's reactions to my telling her I came clean about my struggles with one of the founders. She was absolutely horrified that I would put myself at risk for marginalization. It's a lot of reassuring her that my case was different. Our talks spurred an internal open conversation about mental and emotional obstacles. Matt, another co-worker and I presented on our experiences with burnout, bipolar disorder, and anxiety and depression respectively. We talked about what we go through, what it looks like from the outside, so it would be easier for our colleagues to infer what might be happening based on our behavior, how to be helpful during episodes, and different treatment options. Matt also did some work on OLAX policies on medical leave to explicitly include mental and emotional problems. And you'll see one of the slides that he made where it said mental health and emotional struggles are treated like any other illness because that is what they are. When I started feeling really motivated to talk to OLAX about the quality of work I was putting out during depressive episodes, I relied on a few observations I had made about my work environment to give me the confidence to come forward with my personal problems. And these were the vibrant internal culture, flexibility, and a focus on people. But this is a strong company focused on internal culture. They want their employees to feel happy and balanced. This is best demonstrated through OLAX core values. These are guidelines that everyone lives by at work. They help foster the supportive, empathetic, empowering atmosphere that I've come to know and love. And here they are. The first is chill out. It reminds us to take time and enjoy the greater things in life and that when things go wrong, no lives are on the line. We can breathe easy. Next is help each other. There's an emphasis on growing and mentoring the teammates around you and pushing them to reach their goals. Next is assume good faith. Remind yourself that we are all pushing to make this awesome, even when we have different ideas about how to get there. Next is make it happen. Broken, fix it. Opportunity, seize it. Take initiative. This one's my favorite. Practice empathy. Truly make the effort to listen and understand. Be curious. Learn the why, not just the what. And last is speak your mind. Be willing to say what you're thinking. Know that this is a safe space to express yourself and your concerns. These come through constantly during my workdays. On Mondays during our team meeting, we start with a kudos section where we mention things others did during the week that we appreciated. During code reviews or project meetings, everyone's voices are heard without losing sight of our common goals. My internal presentation on mental health was met with nothing but support from my colleagues. Next is flexibility. Flexibility at work is something that I've always used as a good indicator of companies who care about their employees. Productivity isn't attained by some one-size-fits-all environment. My needs change day to day even. Some days I need to sit at a desk in the office with other people to energize and motivate me. Other days, my anxiety prevents me from effectively interacting with people and I work best in bed with a cat. Olert gives me the freedom to choose which hours I work and where I work them. If I'm sick, I don't have to feel guilty about taking that time off. I knew from the start that they cared about giving employees lots of opportunities to customize their work environment and achieve a healthy work-life balance. They even have a vacation incentive, rewarding employees for taking a consecutive workweek completely off the grid to prevent burnout. I think this deviation from strict work practices shows Olert's support of individualism and creativity and shows its recognition that work-life balance is important. These policies encouraged me to take care of myself and made me feel that they genuinely wanted me to feel well and do well. And I've got pictures of how I took my week off the grid at a music festival in Washington and then an example of at-home work and me in the office. Where Olert's flexibility and internal culture were no-brainers when I was thinking of things that made me comfortable enough to share such personal details of my life, their focus on people is something I recognize after the fact as a factor in my decision. We've been working really hard to craft a mission statement lately and all of the language is tightly focused on people, both inside and outside of our organization. I knew that the company cared about me personally based on my previous observations, but the realization that Olert's regard could be generalized to Olert cares about people really made me feel safe. The mission we're working on list things like creating happy customers by empowering customers and businesses to honestly hear and understand each other, creating a safe space to speak, listen, empathize, and build each other up, and enriching the communities around us. And now you'll see that my cat dresses a taco and my rabbits are back on the screen. To be honest, writing this talk has been extremely difficult for me. Right now I'm amidst one of the longest and most severe depressive episodes I've experienced. I by no means claim to be an authority on mental health or overcoming its effects. I've spent a large portion of this past year feeling disconnected from the world, hollow and apathetic. I've stopped getting out of bed, eating, and sleeping for weeks at a time. I've removed myself from social social situations, including interactions with my co-workers, friends, and even family. I stayed up to the wee hours of the morning, gripped by anxiety, unable to sleep, or move, or think. I'm struggling with illness, just as the flu would prevent me from completing my work, so do my depression and anxiety. I have gotten to a place where I feel comfortable sharing my experience and letting people know when I'm not doing well. I have shorn that source of stress and no longer worry about others, especially at my job thinking I don't care or don't like what I'm doing. It feels so good to know how well supportive I am at work and that I really do have the power to make things happen. After repeatedly being told to keep my problems to myself, for fear of discrimination, it's good to know that it actually is possible to be open about mental health, even at work, and have healthier relationships and less stress for it. Thank you.