Does My School Or Workplace Have An Obligation To Make Special Accommodations For My Bipolar Disorder?

— -- Question: Does my school or workplace have an obligation to make special accommodations for my bipolar disorder?

Answer: So, whether your school or workplace would have to make any accommodations for your bipolar disorder depends on whether it's school or workplace.

So, if it's school, the school would have a responsibility to make accommodations provided that you did disclose the information to the school and they were aware of it.

And usually that's done through what's called an individualized education plan or some variation of that, an IEP, where you would go to the school and usually have an evaluation by the school psychologist and collect supporting documentation. And then the school would devise a very formal plan, in a sense a contract, that they would meet during the school year for your child.

Workplace -- the accommodations have to be made, provided that your HR department has a policy for how they handle medical conditions, in general, and mental health issues, in particular, so that some workplaces have the ability to provide intermittent leave, depending on those sorts of things. So that's something that everyone should check with their own HR representative to be sure of.

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