I used to work in workplace mental health and found that a lot of people had unrealistic expectations of what was within their managers’ power to do, to accommodate their difficulties.
And a lot of this is the fault of misleading, awareness-raising, purportedly stigma-busting, ‘reach out and talk about your mental health!’ messaging - which is for the most part just fluff and PR with little infrastructure or expertise to back it up.
Most people are not skilled, trained or even just basically emotionally and intuitively equipped to handle others’ mental health issues. Particularly anything beyond mild depression or generalised anxiety.
And if you have a team where the majority of staff have MH issues or ND diagnoses (as is fairly common in some lines of work) it is often just not possible from a practical standpoint to accommodate everyone when their needs are often in conflict.
And sometimes we need more support than our workplace is resourced to provide. You may need a weekly one to one with your manager and someone to manage your diary in order to work your best and feel okay, but this is unlikely to be possible in a small organisation running on a skeleton staff with very tight margins.
So while your workplace might be able to make some accommodations and point you in the direction of support services, they should not be your first port of call for emotional support. A lot of workplaces don’t make this clear enough.
Also, if your manager has form for being a complete dick, don’t expect this to change if you disclose your mental health difficulties!
You’d think this was obvious, but SO many people I saw just kept on seeking and expecting help and support from people they knew to be total arseholes. saying things like, ‘as my manager, he should want the best for me!’ When it was clear as day that as well as being a manager, he was also a useless and untrustworthy turd who you wouldn’t want to know your vulnerabilities. And unfortunately you can’t change someone’s shitty personality as an accommodation. Much as that would be nice.
Find the people in your workplace who are decent and fair and supportive, and talk to them about what might help.
If you are looking for particular accommodations, ask for those, or ask HR what accommodations others have found helpful in similar situations.
Speak to your union if you have one, if there are issues around bullying or unfair practices.
But it’s also important to recognise that some accommodations just aren’t going to be possible. One I saw a lot was staff wanting essentially never to have to be surprised by anything - to have loads of advance notice of any changes to the workflow or the environment or the personnel etc. But the organisation itself doesn’t always have loads of notice of big changes. Nobody can give you advance notice of a hostile takeover, or a warehouse fire, or your manager dropping dead of a heart attack.
Most accommodations (apart from things like anccessibity equipment or ergonomic stuff) are things the workplace will commit to trying their best to do in good faith, but can’t always guarantee.
Ultimately our mental health is our own to manage, and if our workplace is frequently triggering us it may be that it’s not the right environment for us, and can never be made to be, and we may find everything much easier in a different role or organisation. (This is the case for anyone really, regardless of mental health or disability status).
It sucks when things are hard - but more than half the battle is looking for support in the right places.