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Poll Does Your PTSD Affect Your Employment Status?

How does your PTSD affect your employment status?

  • Full-time

    Votes: 96 30.5%
  • Part-time

    Votes: 30 9.5%
  • Self-employed

    Votes: 28 8.9%
  • Resting

    Votes: 161 51.1%

  • Total voters
    315
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piglet

MyPTSD Pro
As a lot of you may know, I have been receiving much appreciated and useful support from everyone here on my journey to get myself back to work and the constant battle to stay there. I'm interested to know how many other people manage to keep a job while coping with PTSD symptoms. From this forum, I get the general impression that wanting to maintain a full-time job when you have PTSD may be unrealistic. Anyone who wants to prove this impression wrong - please feel free to say so!!!!

I love my job and want to keep it, but I have come across significant barriers with respect to my employer's response to my diagnosis. I am currently trying to resolve this issue, which may end up in court if things keep going the way they have been. This is not what I want, but I won't be forced to quit my job due to unreasonable manager types. I fully intend to keep on going until my rights in the workplace are upheld. So there. :dummy-spi

Anyway, before I explode again (doing this a lot the last couple of days), please feel free to join in with the employment poll. :smile:
 
By the way - childcare counts as employed in my opinion - it's up to you whether this counts as full or part-time!
 
What a great poll Piglet.

I choose full-time, because I look after my kids, and that is full-time. I rested for a good year or two before landing into full-time looking after the kids, which is what my doctors basically told me to do.

Working with adults, and working with children are two distinctively different things with PTSD, in that working with adults brings out the peer group pressures and expectations that cause undue stress. Dealing with adults requires the capability of intellectual conversation with both positives and negatives, which can lead to undue stress IMHO.

Dealing with children at home, within an environment that you control, is much different from my viewpoint. As a father doing the full-time job of running the house, I know exactly what mothers in that situation have gone through for hundreds of years previously. It is no simple task to achieve. With PTSD though, I actually find it very relaxing. The reason is, is that children are not as stressful as adults with PTSD. Children don't have the intellectual capability to discuss complex meanings of life and society, thus this type of stress is never present. Children just want to know why, and so forth, as they are learning life. Children don't have expectations of you like an adult does. Children just want you to be there for them, play with them, look after them, just to be with them and love them. Nothing more, nothing less. PTSD is very adaptable to this for all intensive purposes, because whilst looking after children has stressors, it isn't intentional to the point of dealing with an adult. When an adult does something wrong, they 100% realise it, where a child, they don't really realise what they have done in relation to the affect it causes to an adult. With the correct mindset, ie. they are just a child, and it is our job to teach them, care for them and look after their general well-beng, most of the stress become non-existant IMHO. I think by looking after my little one, it has helped me deal with the pressures of society and having to cope with certain roles and responsibilities faster than that if I where working within an adult environment.

Anyway, that is my perception and how my life revolves with PTSD.
 
Working as a full-time teacher of 7th graders. Not sure what causes me more stress - PTSD or 12 and 13 year olds who know it all.

Seriously though, I love my job. Have been holding it down for 11 years, the last 6 of which have been in the same school. Working with kids is so much different than working with adults. I prefer the kids...:smile:

Kim
 
I put full-time!

I have been in school (full-time) for the past four years, with two more years of University to go. I also worked full-time during the summers and just got a casual position in my feild!

The sky is the limit no matter our issues!!

Bec
 
i am full-time kindergarten teacher. summers off are a blessing, though. i can't say the ptsd hasn't made it a little harder, though. concentration and memory seem to be lacking. i like my kids to learn "by accident" with lots of activities, but lately we just get the basics. can't get motivated.. my dr. wants me to take a couple more months off, but he doesn't understand how a small private school works. i feel like i have to give it a good try now that i have already agreed to the year. and i LOVE the kids.
 
I'm full-time...as an auto claim adjuster, so I deal with others' trauma all day, every day. I work for the largest auto insurer in Florida, and between regular and hurricane claims, my line of work is VERY stressful.

I'd go nuts if I didn't work full-time.
 
I also prefer children. They don't judge. I stay at home looking after two children of my own and the house. I also look after other people's children. Can be stressful, but it's a nice step toward working outside the home. I hope to run my own business someday. I'd like to do that within the next six years.
 
I voted full time... however that is with a catch.
I believe that the longest I have ever held a job with a single place was one year.
The job I have now I LOVE. I love this job like I have never loved a job before. I love my clients. I love my coworkers. I love my boss.
And I want to cry every day at lunch. The only thing that holds me back is that I don't want to go back from lunch with puffy red eyes. I hate what I do and I know that all my coworkers and my boss hate me. I think they see me as inept and a fraud. I have recently been moved to another shift and all the girls on that shift are "cool" and I am such a nerd. I hate myself and I hate going to work. I hate leaving my room. I want to lay in bed reading books and petting kitties.
But I love my job. I love my coworkers and my boss. I love what I do. I feel fulfilled like never before.
I have been at this job for three months now, and have felt like this from day one.
 
I choose Full time. I work a high stress job where you need to think quick and come up with accurate answers to problems. PTSD does not help in this field in fact it has become harder to think clearly. It is also hard to keep my mind on 1 thing when I need to give 110%. So I take frequent walks to clear my head of everything else. Sometimes I wish I could stay home and take care of the kids but I know I could not do it as well as my wife does.
 
Right there with you, piglet!

From this forum, I get the general impression that wanting to maintain a full-time job when you have PTSD may be unrealistic. Anyone who wants to prove this impression wrong - please feel free to say so!!!!

I love my job and want to keep it, but I have come across significant barriers with respect to my employer's response to my diagnosis. I am currently trying to resolve this issue, which may end up in court if things keep going the way they have been. This is not what I want, but I won't be forced to quit my job due to unreasonable manager types. I fully intend to keep on going until my rights in the workplace are upheld. So there. :dummy-spi

:wall: I feel exactly the same way you do, Piglet...I am supposed to be a full-time teacher, have been teaching at this school for three years, and thought I had a good relationship with my boss. Despite my filing all the proper paperwork and getting TDI for my days off, my principal won't get off of my back for working a reduced schedule. We have no union at my school and she's stressing me out so much I have the added anxiety of trying to go to work and hope she will just leave me alone to teach. I love my kids and don't want to abandon them by going on a full-time leave, but I'm going completely nuts. It doesn't help to hear other teachers talking behind my back about my using this as an excuse for a vacation. I live in Hawaii and everyone is in their own little bubble. Even the most educated people here don't know where the middle east is on a map, much less Lebanon...I feell SOOOOO alone!

I have no idea what you've gone through that brought on the PTSD, but I was stuck in Lebanon this past summer and lost friends there and came very close to dying myself. It took them weeks to get us out of there ?(I'm a U.S. citizen) and I still keep waking up every night hearing the planes and bombs. I know it's in my head but that just makes me feel crazier once I calm myself down. I am seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist (who wants to do nothing but shove pills down my throat.) It's slowly helping...at least I can sleep most of the night now with a ton of meds.
 
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