Abusive Bosses and Your Mental Health

As I've discussed previously, the work environment can cause or exacerbate depression. While factors such as abusive co-workers, a work environment that don't fit your personality or the type of work you're doing can make affect your mental health, in my mind, no one aspect of the workplace can put more stress on your day to day work existence than an abusive boss.

I've had my share of mediocre and/or unpleasant bosses over the years, but one stands out as being truly hazardous to my mental health, and that of a co-worker. I started a new job as an administrative assistant at a big company. Even during the inteview, I had an uneasy feeling about my potential boss, Ravi, but I had wanted to get a foot in the door at this company for years, so I ignored my instincts. Shortly after I started the job, I found out that I should have listened to them.

Ravi would alternate between verbally abusing and praising me and Katherine, a temporary worker. He actually reduced me to tears on more than one occasion, but saved most of his vitriol for Katherine. I'm not sure whether he somehow instinctively knew, but she had grown up with an abusive father and had a series of alcoholic husbands and boyfriends, so she was very vulnerable. I remember him shouting at her one time, "Can't you do anything right?". His ire in that case was completely unjustified, as the mistake he was ranting about had been made by him.

In the short time that Katherine and I worked for him, he had enough of a detrimental effect on her that she started drinking again after being on the wagon for a few years. Given that I didn't have the kind of background that she did, I was upset and intimidated for a while, but eventually got angry and retaliated. Oddly enough, I saw him out in public with his wife, and he was meek as a kitten while she verbally abused him, so I guess he used the workplace to redirect the abuse he experienced at home.

In addition to being abusive, Ravi also was a micro-manager, often with disastrous results. We set up an interviewing marathon for about a hundred people to fill a number of slots in the department. Katherine and I had worked with Human Resources to put together interview packets for the managers who would be doing the actual interviewing. About five minutes before the interviews started (he had ignored the preparations until then), Ravi decided he didn't like the order of the paperwork in the folders, and started rearranging them, as we looked on aghast.

After a while we learned that his attention span was so short that we could just go back to doing things the way we had been after he showed us his "new" way and left. But correcting the mess he made was time-consuming, and not being trusted to do things right in our way instead of his was demoralizing.

Finally, I had enough the Friday before Memorial Day. It was past 5:00, and everyone else had already left, when he decided that I had to document the flowchart he had just written on a whiteboard. (On top of being a bully, he was also incompetent. The flow chart was incomprehensible). I asked him if I could do it when we came back to work on Tuesday, as I had plans that evening. He blew up and started berating me, ending with "Go, go! Get out of here!"