Careers killed with kindness - the risks of revealing mental illness at work

by Jill Margo

''David Westgate was having lunch in Sydney with his old boss recently when he casually revealed he'd been living with bipolar 1 his entire adult life.

"Isn't it odd," his boss replied. "I never knew for a minute that you suffered from it, and there I was suffering from acute anxiety all my life and you didn't have a clue about that, either."

Westgate, 59, who had a successful career in multinational advertising agencies and now runs his own agency, was floored.

"How could it be? We worked side by side, often through 14-hour days, for eight years and had no idea what each other was going through."...''