If you run a business in Scotland, you will have seen materials from the Scottish Association for Mental Health‘s current campaign, Dismissed?, which addresses mental health issues in the workplace. The campaign aims to show employers how a better understanding of employee needs can benefit both the business and the economy.
The campaign is excellent and could not be more timely. At the same time, though, it reveals a frightening gap in the body of knowledge: where are the resources for we freelancers and sole traders who find ourselves dealing with mentally ill people on an individual client basis?
In the four years that I have run my web design business, I have had two clients who had different, severe, protracted, and well-hidden mental health issues. (Given the occurrence of mental illness in the general population, two out of dozens is, in fact, to be expected.) Both, like myself, were self-employed in their own businesses without a team or corporate structure to back them up. Both, by all appearances, were normal, productive professionals. Both were anything but. Both cost me a tremendous amount of time, emotional energy, and anger; and both, financially, left me high and dry. Both, in fact, cost me so much time and energy that I lost other clients as a result.
If these people had been co-workers in an office situation, I could have referred them to HR or a manager. If I was working with them as clients in a corporate environment, a colleague could have intervened. Instead, it fell to me to deal with all of this myself: sorting out which of their requests were related to the business and which were emotional manipulation; gathering the evidence about their behavior and researching the conclusion; trying to press on with the work at hand in the increasingly faint hopes of being paid for it; strategizing how to speak with them without being mistaken for a “friend”;
and then, inevitably, cleaning up the damage from their embarrassing and very public explosions.
It goes without saying that as a sole trader, time spent dealing with clients’ mental health issues is time not spent on billable work, business development, or sales. It pained me to have to spend a billable morning writing an email to a client’s husband asking him to get his wife’s hysterical rages under control, but who else could I have written to? The personal liberty which self-employment affords does, sadly, enable and accelerate the mental health issues which drove some individuals out of the workforce in the first place.
There are, of course, warning signs that a client may be striking out on their own for a reason. And there are often lesser warning signs – the things we chalk up as simple personality quirks – which are obvious in hindsight. But should we freelancers really have to screen all our clients for mental fitness as well as project soundness and their ability to pay? Do we risk becoming cynical, assuming that every new business is yet another vanity project with no hope of commerical viability? There are simply not enough hours in the day to design, code, consult, and – on top of all of that – counsel.
As freelancing becomes the norm and not the exception, the issue of client mental health will become more prominent. If it has not already affected your freelance business, it will. And you don’t have an HR officer, a senior manager, or a colleague to intervene; you have the mental health section of Wikipedia and a full client workload. Mental health charities and organisations should recognise this fact and create resources, guidance, and perhaps even an advice hotline for freelancers and small businesses. Freelancers and sector groups should share experiences about clients with mental health issues in the spirit of educating each other about recognising the warning signs. And everyone should educate themselves about the many forms of mental illness, particularly the personality disorders related to power, influence, and vanity which can flourish in business environments.
If you find these precautions to be inconvenient or distasteful, I can assure you that having a mentally ill client phone you at 10:30 at night to unleash a torrent of raging abuse on you because she just had a fight with her mother is far worse.
What have your experiences been with clients with mental health issues? Were you able to resolve them? What would you have done differently? Please do not include any identifying details.
