The Bipolar Cop Wins

Angela Holland settled her lawsuit with the King County Sheriff's Office yesterday, 18 months after suing her former employer for discrimination and wrongful termination. Holland, for those of you new to this story, was a veteran KCSO deputy who, in June 2004, revealed she had bipolar disorder. She'd done nothing wrong on the job and, in fact, was considered a good cop and had numerous commendations (that speaks well to how bipolars can adapt and do damn near anything they choose). She outed herself because she'd had some meds go south on her, needed to make a switch, and had to have time off to make it work. For this, she was fired four months later--a very fast turnaround for firing a cop.

Meanwhile, the same department didn't fire and, as it turns out, hardly disciplined a veritable rogue's gallery of other KCSO deputies who did some very bad things on and off-duty. Think I am making that up? Read this series by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. If you want to read about the whole Holland story, read this article, which I wrote in 2005.

Holland's case is, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented. When I was reporting on her situation two years ago, I talked to lots of disability and mental health lawyers and not one could think of a case where someone with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia had won a court case against a discriminating employer or had walked away with money in a settlement. I looked at a legal database and the academic journals. I talked with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which administers the ADA. The outcome was the same. Bipolars never win discrimination claims. (Let me know if you know of cases where they have.)

Holland, three weeks before her case was scheduled to go to trial, walked out with money, an agreement by the Sheriff to reclassify her firing from "medical termination" to "medical retirement," and an agreement by the Sheriff to provide Holland with a letter of recommendation. She won. The Sheriff lost. Holland's attorney, Jeff Herman, won. King County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Don Porter, defending the Sheriff, lost. The people who doubted the story I wrote about Holland, or felt it was too activist-ish, have been proven wrong. They can go fuck off now.

Straight-up, Holland made history yesterday. And although there is lots of mental health news the last few days about states investigating Eli Lilly, Pfizer melting down and another examination of some of the Zyprexa documents (not a very revealing examination, in my mind) in the Times of London, this is truly the only story that matters. I'll get back to that other shit another day.

Holland's story has broader implications. It's a story of treatments that don't work well, bad doctors (and a good doctor, too, in the end), medication side effects, social discrimination, employment discrimination and so on. It establishes just how far we haven't come since 1993 when, pardon the self-referential crap for a moment, I was fired from a job after revealing that I was bipolar. The same dynamic was at work as with Holland. I could do my job well, had had meds go south on me and, once the bureaucracy caught on, all of America's unfounded assumptions about the mentally ill came crashing down upon me. Same deal with Holland, except almost 15 years later she came out with a better, but not enough better, result. Perhaps 15 years from now, things will work out much better for the next bipolar who gets jammed up by a moronic employer and their paranoid bureaucratic fantasies.

One other common thread is that Holland and I got screwed by the legal system. In my case, i didn't even have access. In hers, the Prosecuting Attorney's Office pushed its defense so aggressively that it was clear to Holland that going to trial on this case would be a huge roll of the dice. They were going to paint her with every bad thing any bipolar had ever done in history. Enough members of a jury would likely believe DPA Porter's fear-mongering to make a trial unwinnable for Holland. She had to settle. Someday, I will share some of the details from Holland's deposition in this case, in which Porter crossed so many ethical boundaries in his questioning and said so many ugly and false things that he must be held to account.

And he will be. As will others. Stay tuned.