PsychosocialHSenior Contributor
Are others experiencing "masked" dismissals after disclosing mental health at work? (Petition research)
Content note: this post discusses workplace termination, financial hardship, and briefly references suicidal thoughts.
I'm drafting a petition to Parliament proposing reforms such as:
- Safe harbour protections for employers who engage in good-faith accommodation.
- Tax incentives for inclusive hiring of people with disabilities and neurodivergent individuals.
- A voluntary accreditation scheme for mental-health-inclusive workplaces.
- Workplace accommodation grants so the cost of support does not fall entirely on the employer.
- Prohibition on pre-offer inquiries about mental health conditions or disabilities, specifically to protect people with disabilities and neurodivergent individuals from being screened out before they have a chance to demonstrate their capability.
- A fairer process for enforcing workplace rights, so that the 21-day time bar does not become a financial moat that locks out the very people the laws were designed to protect.
Before I lodge it, I want to understand how widespread this experience is.
If you have experienced something similar, I would value hearing from you. Please do not share any identifying details about employers or individuals. I am interested in:
- Roughly how long after disclosure (or a visible crisis) did the exit occur?
- Was it framed as performance, restructure, probation, or something else?
- Was your role replaced?
- Did you feel you had a genuine alternative, or was it a binary choice?
- Industry and role level (for example, "professional services, mid-level")?
- Were you able to access legal help, or was the cost a barrier?
I am not a lawyer and I am not offering advice. I am just trying to find out whether my experience is an outlier or part of a broader pattern. If it is the latter, the petition has a much stronger foundation than pursuing the employers and individuals within them.
MY STORY
I'm a accountant in my early 30s with ADHD, depression, anxiety, and possibly a sprinkle of Autism (Yay! I'm like Thanos but with mental disabilities). Over the past 18 months, I've been let go from two successive white-collar roles shortly after my mental health became visible at work. I'm not here to name anyone or point fingers. I believe my former managers were acting rationally within a regulatory framework that gives them few good options. I'm trying to understand whether others have experienced something similar.
The pattern in my case:
- Strong performance record (positive reviews, pay rise, bonus, public recognition from senior leadership).
- A mental health crisis or disclosure at work.
- Shortly afterwards, a conversation that included the phrase "we just want to work out how we can best support you."
- A binary choice: performance improvement plan or severance.
- Exit within 1 to 2 weeks of the disclosure, framed as a performance issue.
Why I'm only asking this now:
When the second termination happened, I had a suspicion that something bigger was going on. The timing, the language, the binary choice, the way it rhymed with my first experience. But I was exhausted, unwell, and trying to focus on the future. I told myself I would move on.
Then on 5 March 2026 I read about the death of a NAB employee at the bank's Docklands headquarters. The reporting that followed raised questions about how large organisations handle employees in distress. I'm not drawing any conclusions about that specific case. The coroner will do that, and the family deserves privacy. But reading about it cracked something open for me.
I went and looked up when the psychosocial hazard laws actually came into effect. I learned that Victoria's Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 only commenced on 1 December 2025, making Victoria the last Australian jurisdiction to introduce specific regulations on psychosocial hazards. These are very new laws. We are all still in the first year or two of seeing how they play out in practice.
The legislative gap (as I understand it):
The intent of the psychosocial hazard regulations was good. Treat mental health like physical safety. Employers now have a positive duty to identify and manage workplace factors that can harm mental health.
The unintended consequence, as I see it, is that these obligations attach to the employer the moment they become aware of an employee's mental health condition. Directors and officers can face personal liability for failing to manage psychosocial risks. Suddenly, a disclosure is not just a conversation about support. It is a compliance event that creates legal exposure.
The loophole is this: the easiest way to extinguish that exposure is to remove the person before the duty fully crystallises. Probation clauses, performance frameworks, and "mutual" severance agreements all provide mechanisms to exit an employee quickly and quietly. None of them require the employer to admit that mental health played any role. The employee is told it is about performance. The paperwork says the same. And because the employee is usually in no state to fight, most never test the real reason.
It feels to me like a knee-jerk reaction to directors not wanting to be personally liable for other people's mental health, combined with a framework that gave them an easy way out. The people making these decisions are doing what the system rewards them for doing. That is why I think legislative change is the right target, not individual blame.
The financial trap:
I want to be honest about what termination actually means for someone in my position. My mental health services are paid for out of my own pocket. Psychiatry, psychology, medication, GP appointments. Termination does not just remove my income. It removes the support system that keeps me well. For someone already in a fragile state, the second termination was the nail in the coffin.
Government support is not available to me. My wife's income is above the Centrelink threshold, but her income alone is not enough to sustain us. I am in the gap: too unwell to work, not poor enough to qualify for help, dependent on the generosity of my father to keep the lights on. I am one of the lucky ones. I have a family who can catch me. Many people in my position may not have that.
The legal trap:
Under the Fair Work Act, a General Protections claim must be filed within 21 days of dismissal. Twenty-one days, during a period when I was in clinical crisis, had no income, and could not afford legal representation. The time bar is, in effect, a financial moat. It means only people with savings, resilience, and immediate access to legal advice can enforce their rights through case law. Everyone else is locked out of the very mechanism that would shift the law in their favour.
Even if I could make the deadline, there is another problem. In professional services, a reputation for "suing your employer" is a career-ender, regardless of the merits. If I pursue an unfair dismissal claim, word spreads. I would be trading my future earning capacity for a principle. Even with strong evidence, the commercial reality is that it is safer for me to stay quiet and move on.
So I am in a real dilemma. I move on, and the cycle continues for the next person. I pursue it, and I risk being pushed out of my profession and into deeper financial distress. Neither option is survivable without help. Is it a stark reality - that people have to die for things to change?
A hard thing to say:
I want to be honest with this community because I think honesty is the only thing that will change any of this. There have been moments in the last few weeks where I have had the thought that ending my life would be easier than continuing. I have not acted on it. I won't act on it. I have a wife I love, parents who are holding me up, and a dream to have a child I want to meet one day. I know that ending my life would create more problems than it would solve, not fewer. But I understand, now, how someone in a worse position, without the support I have, could feel they had no other choice. That understanding is part of why I am writing this. The system should not put people in that position. It currently does.
At the end of the day, we are all trying to survive. But where we let greed and selfishness consume us, we all lose. It is why I do not blame the individuals. I blame the framework.
Thank you for reading. Let's try and change this, if this is not an isolated event.
