To declare your issues to work colleagues

[Daygloboo]

What are the rules around this. I dont know. A few years ago, I had a manager who upset loads of people..All her issues seemed to be around a need to control absolutely every aspect of the office...especially the physical aspects. . She got worked up about mechanisms to do with the entrance door , objects in the kitchen and office itself, people's responsibilities relating to these physical aspects, etc. Would be smily and nice to people and then the next minute you'd find out she'd run off to the buildings manager complaining and telling tales about things other people had 'done'. She had unpleasant ' differences' with at least 10 people during the time she was there. In my own case, she tried at one point to get me to ' tell off' a colleague i'd always got on with for some 'misdemeanour' she'd perceived they'd 'committed' in relation to god knows what.....i cant.even remember. One day i was alone in the office with her up the other end and i think she forgot i was there. I saw her doing what looked.like ritualistic tapping with her elbows on a door. It was then everything kind of clicked and i realised she probably had OCD . Her behaviour had really got everyone's back up over the time she was there and i coulsnt help thinking how.muxh easier it would have been if we'd all known from the beginning, because then we would have better understood why she felt such an apparently overwhelming need to xontrol the office environmwt and everybody in it. And we might have been able to come up with some strategies to help her... Anyone else had this and what did you do about it. Not strictly AIBU i know but interested in your views aa people like this can really cause havic in an office.

Disordered.

Yeah it's awful. My one was such a bully. I don't care what MH issues she had she was annoying and rude all the time! I've got loads of MH issues and would never piss off every single one of my colleagues for no apparent reason!

From my experience of workplaces. I think employers are very bad at dealing with genuinely difficult people.

1, you don't know that she has OCD thats just your armchair diagnosis which btw doesn't fit the pattern of behaviour you describe
2, you may claim that her behaviour was inappropriate, however if you've been told not to do something or put things in certain places but continue to do so then you are the problem.
3, if you had valid concerns about her bullying staff they should have been brought up with hr
4, you feeling stressed doesn't give you the right to demand someone else's medical information is given to you.
In short YABU and need to accept that you have no right to know anyone's medical information and even less to assign medical conditions to people when you aren't a dr and they aren't your patient

I don't have OCD but I have ASD and ADHD. My colleagues are aware of it but they absolutely do not come up with strategies to help me cope because it categorically isn't their place to do so. It would be really quite offensive to give your unsolicitied opinion on someone's disability and how they should manage it in any setting, but is especially inappropriate in the workplace.

Nobody has any right to know anybody else's medical conditions.

Being an unpleasant twat shouldn’t lead you to think the twat has a mental health illness

Yeah you're not wrong. This one went on for years!

Nailed it

And also nailed it!

Exactly!

I can see what you're saying OP but I don't think the answer is to require people to disclose confidential health information.

What would be better is for more companies to have disability awareness at the forefront of their people management strategies, because that starts from the perspective of "what are the barriers to achieving potential and how can these be mitigated" - so for eg in your colleague's case the barriers are being thrown off beam on encountering unpredictable behaviour and circumstances and the mitigation could be developing line management support encouraging strategies to deal with it and modelling positive reinforcement behaviour to peers.

Ppl with ocd control to relieve anxiety not because they WANT power. I think that is what she was doing. And i very much feel that if a person's behaviour is constantly upsetting everybody then it does need to be.dealt with. HR yes, of course, but initially it is often the colleagues who are bearing the brunt and who will.( quite naturally )be working through in their own minds what is going on. I wasnt going round like sigmund freud with a clipboard.

She might have had OCD, she probably had other MH problems, and she was clearly an unpleasant micro-managing controlling old boot. You'll never get the true story, but i do think its quite interesting to reflect on these sorts of situations, and sometimes you need the distance of time to help you process it all.

She does sound incredibly trying to work with!

I wasnt going round like sigmund freud with a clipboard.

now you are! 😆

No one has to inform you of any medical condition they have. Have you not heard of medical privacy?

Sorry to use a disrespectful term, but yes everybody eventually thought she was bloody bonkers. One day she was arguing with( and literally running alongside) a colleague who was a wheelchair user. The wheelchair user was off to the loo and actually said to her " Are you planning on coming into the toilet with me "..That's how obsessive she was about controlling and getting her point across.

Again you don't know she has OCD thats just your uneducated opinion which is worth nothing.
You should be raising any concerns with your manager when the behaviour is impacting you and then hr not putting up with it.
You are still insisting that she has OCD because you (with no medical training) have decided that she has it and are using that to demand people hand over their private medical information to all staff. Again I ask what other medical information should everyone be forced to hand over?

Oh you are funny OP.

You haven't a clue either way whether she has OCD and all this happened years ago anyway.

It's baffling the things people start threads about.

I’m going to guess the OP was a “character” in this workplace

That's how obsessive she was about controlling and getting her point across.

or….

brace yourself @Daygloboo

its just about how unpleasant a person she was

Do you have any diagnosed neuro diversities or mental health Illnesses@Daygloboo ?

If it was a very long time ago she might well be dead by now. Or retired anyway.

I have ocd and I never would behave like this. Nor have I declared it to my employer and never will.

It sounds (ocd or not) like she was just an incredibly unpleasant person to work with. And your company should have dealt with it (feedback rounds/performance reviews?) if it was affecting other people.

But other than that, part of an office environment is dealing with other people with different personalities.

This was years ago..

How many?