Symptoms of anxiety disorders do not include lying, manipulating, or abuse. You're pathologizing shitty behavior when the truth is that some people do bad things for reasons that have nothing to do with mental illness.
I’ve seen some speculation by physiologists that anxiety is often unrecognized in men, because it often causes anger. People just think they’re dealing with another angry man, but it’s really a manifestation of someone who’s scared, and only has limited ways to express it.
Of course this doesn’t excuse any bad behavior. It seems highly likely to me that much of this bad behavior is caused by mental illness. Yet, we insist against this, because of mores regarding personal responsibility.
But this type of intense anxiety, from which most workplace abuses manifest, cannot be easily healed. So if you see abuses at your company, fire the offender or leave. Don't let HR think they can simply heal the abuser it won't happen as every study has shown.
That is a huge assumption to make, without any supporting evidence.
> But intense anxiety, from which most workplace abuses manifest..
I agree with the GP. You can't pseudo-intellectually rationalize all malice as mental illness.
I don’t think a link to mental illness is even really disputed anymore. They’ve actually started screening people out of traditional programs, due to mental illness and drug addiction in criminal abuse cases. I’m trying to say away from the hairy politics here, as it can get quite heated.
Sociopaths are abusers because they utterly lack empathy, are prone to risk taking to the point where they will harm self and others, and may even lack the brain structures that make empathy possible. Clearly no amount of management training is going to fix that.
Narcissists are abusers because they live in a state of constant severe unconscious anxiety, trying to shore up a very brittle and fragile ego with fantasies of omnipotence and irresistibility. Most people are narcissistic some of the time, but pathological narcissists are narcissistic to the point that they cannot have normal human relationships, ever. Again - you're not going to fix someone like that with a training course, because it's more of a embedded psychological and emotional disability. Even therapists don't rate the chances of improvement very highly after extended sessions - so a week or two certainly won't be enough.
None of this has any connection to being anxious about something, like a deadline, or a date, or an exam. Or with panic attacks. Or with being an overtly anxious person who may be prone to worry. That's a different syndrome and isn't noticeably linked to abusive behaviour.
Instead, these are classed as personality disorders - so not quite mental illness, but also not quite sanity.
There are no psychotic delusions, and no loss of lucidity. But there are severe emotional distortions and disabilities which can be contagious in that they promote harm of self and others. They're also just plain unpleasant and toxic to be around.
Trying to decide if someone with one of these conditions is actually responsible for their own actions is as much of a philosophical problem as a moral one. But it's absolutely clear that people with Dark Triad issues are almost invariably poisonous in organisations and will create extremely unpleasant and toxic experiences in a work environment.
I love this explanation so much, thank you. People tend to want to forgive their fellow human being when they realize their odd behavior is connected to just them being a little awkward and anxious or nervous, and that's great all of the time; everyone is constantly experiences both sides of this.
But when you're HR and you see abuse at your organization, you gotta realize there's a difference between having empathy and straight up rescue fantasies. Sociopaths are rare so you're rarely going to deal with them but they're easy to spot and fire when they cause workplace trouble. But people with narcissistic tendencies can and do hide behind HR's rescue fantasies to be enabled to play out their fucked up world view on their workers, and that's why we have so many psychology studies out here telling us to, yeah, just fire workplace abusers when it happens.
You lost me here a bit, but I agree with the rest. It depends what you judge to be "abusive". People definitely suffer extreme, inappropriate worry about things that make sense to worry about. They also have general feelings of worry that cause distress.
These stresses sometimes manifest in testiness. Depending on the relationship or how well liked the person is, this tends to get judged as normal tension or "abuse". I've definitely been abused by people who were clearly letting themselves be wound up. I've wondered if the person has pathological problems (eg narcissism, anxiety). I don't know if I'd go so far as saying the person is not redeemable, but the behavior was definitely unacceptable and included name calling.
I think a lot of people just don't want it to be true, but it is. That doesn't mean you have to put up with the behavior, because "they have a heart of gold deep down", or anything like that. It's just wrong to say that general anxiety isn't associated with any abusive behaviors categorically (it's really one of those statements that's the exact opposite of the truth). I've seen it happen.
You should be able to pathologize people without it taking away their personal responsibility. Otherwise nobody would have responsibility in a deterministic world.
That doesn't mean there are no underlying causes.