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After 911 there is a medical background check, once a company learns I am mentally ill I get the rejection letter that says "overqualified" that rejects me.

I had a hard time trying to find work, with a history of being mentally ill on the records and my background. Most people hide it and don't see a doctor and go undiganosed because of the social stigmas of being mentally ill.

I happen to suffer from schizoaffective disorder which is rare less than .05% of the population has it. It is like bipolar and schizophrenia combined.

When I did have a job as soon as they learned I was mentally ill from my communications, I was bullied, harassed, and picked on, and then eventually fired when I had a panic attack from the stress.

I am sure if I found the right company that wouldn't treat me that way or understand mentally ill people and don't let their employees pick on, bully, and harass them.

I used to earn $150K/year as a programmer, but now they say that is too much money to trust to a mentally ill person. In all honesty it was never about the money, I just loved programming and happened to become good at it in Visual BASIC and Active Server Pages, which are 13+ years out of date now. But I still try to keep up and learn.

My wife doesn't want me to relocate, or else I've have worked for Google in 1999, and I might have avoided the stresses I had that made me mentally ill in 2001. So I am sort of stuck in St. Louis MO and what companies there are here to work that don't like mentally ill people working for them. We tend to drive up health care costs for their insurance and when they think of disabled people they think of people in wheelchairs not the mentally ill. They tried to justify firing be by having a software contractor work $100/hr to do my job while I was in a hospital claiming that none of my coworkers could operate at my level of work. This fits the undue hardship clause of the employment law.

I had about three employers do that to me in a row, and my doctor put me on disability because I couldn't get a stable job.

I was usually hired to debug software to get a company to the next level. I optimized ADO recordsets, SQL Server tables and stored procedures, optimized Crystal Reports reports, and fixed broken Visual BASIC code so it wouldn't crash the machine and it runs faster. I also did web development in Active Server Pages using VBScript and HTML and CSS and JavaScript.

But like I said, no company wants to hire me now, and if they did it would only be temporary to use me to get to the next level and then fire me after I got them there. I feel like a third stage rocket booster.



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