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The company has a very generous mental health policy. 25 free counseling sessions a year. They're supposed to be for short term use. However, I heard a separate complaint that none of the available counselors were African American and thus wouldn't understand the employee's specific issue.

As someone who has been through counseling, and with two immediate family members who are professional psychologists, I can tell you that "understanding someone's specific issue" doesn't matter nearly as much as one might think. People have this idea that the counseling process is analogous to a medical procedure: you go to the doctor, describe the problem, they diagnose you, and prescribe an intervention. That is not generally how it works. There is a little bit of that on occasion, but mostly counseling works simply through the process of rendering your feelings into words in the presence of another human being who is listening to you but in whom you are not emotionally invested and who is not emotionally invested in you. That, in and of itself, turns out to be tremendously helpful. (The same mechanism is in play in other kinds of human activities as well, like book clubs, writers groups, or religious gatherings.) You don't have to be black to learn how to provide this service to someone who is.

Nothing you said is relevant if the person will refuse council if they percieve it to be from someone who won't be able to understand their issues.

But it is ironic that someone would seek therapy to cope with a racist world, and but refuse service based on the race of the therapist.

Well, sure, but that's on them. The belief that a counselor will not be able to help you, for whatever reason, will generally be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I see no salient difference between a black person deciding that a white person can't help them because they are white, and a white person deciding that a black person can't help them because they are black. To me, both of those positions are equally odious. One thing I've learned first-hand over the years is that you can't help someone who won't help themselves.

Genuine question:

Are women who have been abused by men odious for seeking female therapists?

FWIW lisper mentioned that in another subthread at about the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718590

You do need to trust and have a rapport with the counselor, though. While it's true that counseling is more about fixing yourself than having someone fix you, the process doesn't work if you aren't willing to open up in the first place.

> You do need to trust and have a rapport with the counselor, though.

Yes, but you need to trust them as a professional, not as a personal confidante who shares your life experience.

In my experience, if the patient does not have a certain level of rapport with the counselor, the effectiveness is greatly reduced because neither party can be confident that they're effectively communicating. Communicating across cultural barriers is more difficult and lower bandwidth.

See this comment and my response to it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718444

However, this relies on the ability of the person issuing the treatment to provide the appropriate amount of response to the person making the problems into words. If I talked about my (hypothetical) child abuse to a psychologist and the psychologist began engaging in therapeutic techniques to normalize the abuse I would be extremely offended and likely come out worse for wear.

If I, a person of color, am having emotional difficulty processing the anxiety I feel about police persecution after being exposed to information that my race is being disproportionately persecuted, I really need a healthcare professional that (at the very least) has knowledge on when to engage in trying to direct me from my anxieties vs acknowledging that I am experiencing a normal amount of anxiety for the situation. Part of this may in fact be wanting a healthcare professional who is of my race because I have been harmed in the past by professionals who did not share my race practicing inappropriate treatments on me.

Similarly, there are plenty of female patients that ask for a female doctor, even in non-therapy medicine, because plenty of medication, illnesses, etc. show differently for women.

That's a fair point, but I'd argue that gender differences and racial differences are, well, different. There really are salient biological differences between males and females, whereas the differences between blacks and whites, while real, are purely social constructs. If you judge a prospective counselor by the color of their skin you are IMHO part of the problem.

This is not to say that you shouldn't judge a counselor by their behavior after you've started working with them. But I think it's possible for a person with black skin to be just as insensitive to the concerns of black people as someone with white skin, e.g. Clarence Thomas.

"There really are salient biological differences between males and females, whereas the differences between blacks and whites, while real, are purely social constructs."

But doesn't that mean race can potentially become extremely important when the treatment is via a form of structural socialization?

> If you judge a prospective counselor by the color of their skin you are IMHO part of the problem.

An emotional barrier that is part of the problem for which a person is seeking treatment:

(1) is not a judgement, and

(2) indisputably is part of the problem.

But, in any case, whether either or both of those are true or not doesn't change the fact that it is a real issue impacting the likely treatment outcomes that is sensitive to whether the counselor is in the group triggering the negative response or not.

> If you judge a prospective counselor by the color of their skin you are IMHO part of the problem.

There's a rather small but critical lack of nuance in your sentiment.

The idea isn't that you judge the person because of their skin color. Nobody is saying being white or black makes you a worse or better counselor or person. The idea is that you merely judge the likelihood that the person will be able to relate to you about something in your own personal life. There's nothing "problematic" about making that kind of judgment. It doesn't need to be justified or rational to anybody else. It's your personal life that you're looking for someone to open up to. Nobody else has any right to anything in your personal life, and you have every right and responsibility to make it better by your own criteria. If there's any problem here, it's the sentiment that other people have a right to dictate whom you should and shouldn't involve in your personal life.

> As someone who has been through counseling, and with two immediate family members who are professional psychologists, I can tell you that "understanding someone's specific issue" doesn't matter nearly as much as one might think.

That probably depends on what kind of “counselor” is involved; the same term can be used to refer to a variety of to licensed mental health professionals or to people who are basically peer counselors with minimal specialized education. The latter is relying very heavily on their own lives experience, so it clearly matters.

Even for the professionals, psychological safety of client with the counselor is going to be a significant factor, and someone who is coming from a place of perceived pervasive hostility and neglect from outside of their own racial group that leaves them metaphorically curled up in a ball of fear and silence around people outside their race is going to be hard for someone who triggers that reaction in them to help.

Business idea: Machine learning drives a realistic video and audio avatar of a human therapist to ask occasional "How does that make you feel" type questions.

As part of the session the therapist asks you to rate a few different categories of your mental life (e.g. "How content are you with your life/relationships/family/future on a scale of 1 to 5?) The ratings then can be used for data to develop better questions and techniques and marketing claims (people with 1 or more Virtual Therapy seasons a week experience an X% improvement in indicators of mental health).

Subscription model: 10 bucks a month gets two one hour virtual therapy sessions a week.

This concept is explored in ELIZA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_(video_game)

https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/doctor/

Keep it simple: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YkPnwoYyE

From my personal experience, I can agree with "personal experience" not mattering as much. But on the other hand, I received counseling as a teenager and my first counselor wasn’t a good fit for me at all (while my dad loved him) and I switched to another. I can imagine a black person having a harder time connecting to a non-black psychiatrist.

I agree. I'm a black man, and my counselor is an older white woman. She completely changed my life, helped me build self esteem, and taught me why doing what the ex-Google employee does is a bad idea (reading tons of negative news, and stressing myself out over issues bigger than I am). There are certain things that she can't relate to, but the root of all emotional healing is becoming a better person overall.

It sounds like this guy spends way too much time on Twitter/Tumblr (Twitter is essentially Tumblr circa 2013 since everyone left their porn blogs behind). America is definitely racist still. I experience suspect shit from white people all the time, but I don't let it bother me because I don't have the power to change anyone. It sounds like this guy doesn't realize that you can't live a healthy life (mentally) and non-ironically be radical about certain social issues IRL.

> Where are you headed, [REDACTED]?” another teammate asked with an innocuous timbre as the restof our pod curiously awaited my response.

He even acknowledges the fact that they weren't purposely being mean or anything, they just don't understand how the ex-Googler is feeling. I'm not taking up for his co-workers, but I bet if he spoke up in a chill way, they would've corrected themselves and explained what they really meant. But instead, the ex-Googler drops his head, leaves the office, and writes a slander essay like a passive aggressive little [redacted].

To wrap this up: Yes, there are some fucked up cops out there who are shooting unarmed black men, but the majority of cops aren't terrible people, and expecting privileged white people to understand us is counter-productive. White people will NEVER understand how it feels to be a black man in this country, and it's not worth trying to explain it. All we can do is be the best we can be, and hope the kindness, smiles, and compassion are reciprocated. If not, fuck em.

I think that's a healthy outlook. It's not your job to educate your coworkers. Though, I think people should feel ok discussing it. The idea that white people would "never" understand is a little bit much, but it's not going to be an easy conversation. This is the type of thing that you are only going to change minds about by methodical teaching. Honestly, I don't recommend it, unless this is a friend of yours that you want to maintain for a long time, and think it's worth investing the effort for the long term health of the friendship.

> White people will NEVER understand how it feels to be a black man in this country

Personally, I'd prefer to change things so that "how it feels to be black in this country" is no longer a thing that needs to be understood. Yeah, I know this isn't going to happen in my lifetime, but even a white boy can dream.

Your post started out rather sympathetically, but I find I lack sympathy by the end. You rage against how racist you think white people are, a belief you justify with absurd generalisations - white people are "privileged", they will "NEVER" understand (not even if they try and you talk to them about it), and so on.

I have to say something deeply unpopular here - yes, I know in America maybe it's different, but there's only racist people I've ever met have been people engaging in this kind of casual racism against whites. I never saw the opposite. Most accusations of it turn out to be bad statistical assumptions, like "percentage by race of people experiencing a bad outcome differ from the general population, so it must be racism" - ignoring all other factors.

I disagree. I personally get cheesed off with psychologists and counselors who I don't feel a connect with. Imho best one's are those that know what is involved in creating an empathetic connection. Sport psychologists are much more interesting to me in that sense cause they can't pretend not to be invested in the person or the team winning.

> none of the available counselors were African American

Respectfully, are you sure you didn’t mean “Black?” “African American” doesn’t accurately capture e.g., Caribbean and Latin American identities.

The specific issues the OP referenced were police brutality in the US against blacks, so I would assume he specifically meant African American.

Maybe Black is a better choice in this case? Sorry, I'm a bit ignorant as to the precise nuances of identity that this person felt were important here.

Sorry I didn’t mean to phrase it as directed at you. It was supposed to be a general statement with context. I suppose I could also do to watch my own language :)

I think this request for more mental health support comes from Google's "we're everything to you" policy. Googlers here and elsewhere have compared Google to a college campus in many ways - "you go be smart and do your thing, and the Company will provide for you". Given than mentality/social compact, it's understandable that this employee would think asking for more mental health services would be ok.

>have compared Google to a college campus in many ways - "you go be smart and do your thing, and the Company will provide for you"

I guess this explains why many Google products seem to be pretty brilliant in many ways, but then have utterly glaring missing basic features or problems which never get fixed no matter how much users complain about them.

I mean, I think that colleges are not responsible for the mental health of their students, at least to the degree it has been demanded the last few years - the whole 'safe space' concept has gotten out of control. The whole point of college is to learn and be exposed to new ideas, some of which will be uncomfortable and you're supposed to learn to deal with that. Colleges aren't completely indemnified from how students are exposed but the recent demands have been "don't expose me to things I'll disagree with".

> Now if the employee was experiencing mental health issues as a direct result of coworkers or the work environment, then yes, the company should provide support.

I think you kinda nailed there - he was placed in awkward situations where the other employees suddenly didn't have an opinion one way or another, whereas they had lots of opinions about ebola, etc... I'm wondering if therapy is even the correct word. It's more of a societal shield we all put up in various circumstances.

Sometimes I try to imagine a world where women or men, other races, would swap places with someone from an actual conversation I had to help me reveal my own biases by trying to examine how things would go differently. We should be at a place where the conversation doesn't really change.

For example let's say you're talking to your uncle about crime in the midwest. Suddenly swap them out for a black person from Minnesota. Is that conversation different now? Why? How do you internalize that so that when you speak you can speak to anyone.

Another example - tradeshows. Sometimes I hear people talking about the customer like they are a wallet - now pretend that those people are suddenly talking TO the customer.

Not only do we have the ability to see how messed up our own actions and language is, but you can now see it in other people.

I'm not saying doing that kind of thing is going to fix all problems, but it is a very good thought exercise.

> Is that conversation different now?

Well… yeah, but only because I’m going to be careful what I say to avoid stepping on somebody else’s feelings. To dance around the point just a bit - there are people who I can safely be completely honest with, and people who I cannot safely be completely honest with. I’m not sure I’m the one who needs to be doing the adjusting to change that.

Changing your conversations, or more importantly your opinions that you're willing to express based on the person in front of you - well that's just a normal trait that allows you to participate in society at large.

A tame example: I don't talk about the latest in non-volitile memory advances with my friends that I play videogames with.

> We should be at a place where the conversation doesn't really change.

Sounds like some Harrison Bergeron bullshit. I'd rather people have different experiences and opinions but be able to calmly disagree about it.

Practicing debating skills on subjects you don't agree with can be enlightening. Often you will broaden your perspectives, and sometimes you find better ways to argue with how you actually feel outside of a debate context.

I try to internalize a lot of this when I find myself ignorant on a given position one way or another. It helps one to get out of ones' own box. It's also a skill that I feel too few people genuinely exercise and resort to talking louder and trying to shut people down instead of debating a position rationally. Once you lose your temper, you really lost the argument as far as most observers are concerned and look a bit like a nut.

I think too many people spend too little time in uncomfortable or awkward situations to a point where they're literally unable to deal with them. We've had a level of societal protection for our youth to a point where we're no longer raising functional adults but really big toddlers emotionally speaking.

Rational people should be able to have rational conversations with any rational person regardless of differences of specific opinion. We're at a point where that's approaching an exception and not the rule that most people are rational.

Did you read the memo?

The author describes a specific scenario where a co-worker brought up these issues as work. So, yes, it sounds like for this person it was work-related.

However, I disagree with the author's recommendation to provide additional mental health support for people of color.

I think employee affinity groups for employees of different cultures can be a good idea, but specifically targeting POC for "mental health" services? That's not a good precedent.

Frankly, this memo is not well-written, my initial inclination was to dismiss aspects of it because I had a hard time following the reasoning, but once I read it a couple of times, I came around to agreeing about the diagnosis of the problem, but not all of the recommendations offered.

"People talking about stuff" isn't work-related, work isn't making you talk with people about those events. It's just a side-effect of socialization.

In a professional environment, there need not be any kind of social element at all. Employees are there to get the job done, not hang-out and shoot the proverbial. There is nothing stopping people from going and grabbing lunch or a beer after work and discussing whatever they feel.

Totally agree. Get off social media, shake the hands of your neighbor, and read a book instead of news. Your life will be better and you'll realize that it is not the end of life when someone disagrees with you.

It doesn't matter what is the source of an employee's health issue, the health insurance offered by the employer should cover everything. Though I can understand how some might see it differently after being prodded into place through corporate exploitation and the US healthcare system.

Sounds like an US problem.

In countries with universal health care private companies have nothing to do with health related problems.

FWIW: Norway has very good universal bealth care and my employer still has health insurance that goes above and beyond that.

Just mention to point out that companies can put an effort into this even if thwy don't have to.

In my country with universal health care if you ask for counseling you might get one free session after waiting for six months.

Typically, we hold only one full-time job, through which we acquire all the means of our subsistence. As other commenters have pointed out, this includes--crucially--our health insurance, from which we derive all of our health-needs.

As such, it's the employers' exclusive responsibility to accommodate our health needs. We do not have adequate access, otherwise.

Was reading the US news perhaps part of his job? Google runs one of the largest news machines. Hopefully someone in there is actually reading the stuff the machines collect and disseminate to users.

I once had a boss that always talked guns. Every day he would go on about some politician's secret gun control agenda. The daily news wasn't part of the job until he made it so.

> Now if the employee was experiencing mental health issues as a direct result of coworkers or the work environment

Literally the opening quote:

”Over the last 5 years I’ve heard co-workers spew hateful words about immigrants, boast unabashedly about gentrifying neighborhoods, mockingly imitate people who speak different languages, reject candidates of color without evidence because of ‘fit.’”

That's not what he's asking for, though. Here's his recommendation for change:

> my mental health has been heavily influenced by what I read in the news. ...Google needs to provide mental health support... mak[e] a[n] ... effort to create opportunities ... to seek counseling and support.

If he stated instead that his mental health was influenced by his coworkers hateful remarks, or rejecting candidates due to "fit", then yes, I would absolutely agree this is a great direction for Google to head towards.

But that's not what the employee is asking for.

The former employee used one particular story to describe things at the company that generally made them uncomfortable over the course of their 5 year tenure there, including their coworkers’ reaction to news events that affected them, and hiring practices that they perceived as biased (“reject candidates of color because of “fit””).

The former employee then makes several suggestions, including rethinking hiring practices, providing more robust diversity training, and additional counseling/support for underrepresented employees.

You can debate the validity/truthfulness you perceive in the employee’s account, you can debate whether you think the suggestions are good or not, but saying this isn’t an employer based issue seems like just putting your head in the sand.