Disabled Employees & Accommodation

The whole game is what they knew: thirty years of mental-health cases, read together

What California's mental-health disability cases mean for you — whether you're still on the job and struggling, or already out the door — and where the law may be headed next.

By Bruce Weisenberg · Published July 31, 2026 · Last reviewed July 31, 2026 · 11 min read

Here's what nobody tells you — not at the desk, and not later, on the walk out of the building. The law that decides these cases is usually settled before your last day, and not by anything you did. It comes down to what your employer knew, and when they knew it.

That cuts two ways. If you've already lost the job, your case likely turns on reconstructing that moment — what they knew, and when they knew it. But if you're still employed, the decision that matters most is still ahead of you: whether to tell the people you work for something private. Under California law, that choice, whether and when to speak, will shape what follows more than anything your employer does.

The cases stretch back thirty years, from a bipolar county worker fired in 1997 to a Target employee whose case was decided in May 2026, fired after asking his coworkers whether he'd killed anyone. Put them all together and they say one thing, over and over: California draws a hard line at the moment your employer learned about your condition. Before that moment, they can do almost anything to you. After it, they owe you almost everything. There is shockingly little in between.

That's the line. Here is how it got drawn.

Before they know: almost anything goes

Start with the oldest case that still matters. Brundage v. Hahn, 1997. A woman with bipolar disorder, fired over absences and mistakes that were — everyone later agreed — products of her condition. She lost. The court's logic was cold but clean: an employer can't discriminate against a disability it doesn't know exists. If they fired you for the conduct, and they didn't know about the condition underneath the conduct, the law calls it a legal firing.

Twenty years later, Featherstone: a woman resigns during a medication-induced altered mental state — her mind, briefly, not her own — recovers days later, asks for her job back. The employer says no, and the court blesses it — because when she resigned, the employer didn't know her mind wasn't her own.

And this spring, Husband v. Target: a man in obvious psychiatric crisis — paranoid statements, talk of self-harm, asking whether he'd killed people — sent home, and terminated a day later under a workplace-violence policy. The court said Target never legally "knew" he was disabled. Watching a breakdown, the court held, only counts as knowledge if disability is the only reasonable explanation for what the employer saw. Maybe he was on drugs. Maybe he hadn't slept. Case over.

Three decades. Same wall. If you never told them, you were never protected. It is a hard rule — more on why below — but it is the rule, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

After they know: the ground shifts completely

Now look at the other side of the line, because it's a different country.

The moment your employer knows — and the courts have been clear since Prilliman in 1997 that you don't need magic words, don't need to say "FEHA" or "accommodation," don't even need to name a diagnosis — the duties arrive all at once, and they are real. They have to work with you to find an accommodation. They have to actually engage, not just nod and file. And here is the part most people don't believe until they see the cases:

They don't have to hate you to be liable. In Wallace, a sheriff's department pulled a deputy with knee injuries off duty because it sincerely, wrongly believed his condition made him unsafe. Pure concern. No malice anywhere. Still illegal. In California, acting on the disability is the discrimination — "we were just worried about you" is not a defense, it's often a confession.

The timeline testifies. In Lin v. Kaiser, the company swore the layoff decision predated any knowledge of the disability. Except the layoff list kept changing, and the bad performance reviews showed up after the disability did. The court said a jury gets to smell that. If your reviews were fine for years and turned rotten the month after you disclosed, that sequence is evidence — and a jury gets to read between the lines.

There is one big exception. California treats threats or violence differently. In Wills v. Superior Court (2011), an employer that knew about an employee's bipolar disorder was still allowed to fire her over threats she made to coworkers. The court held that in that narrow situation — threats or violence — an employer may treat the misconduct as separate from the disability, even though the disability caused it. It is a real limit, and it is the law.

Before knowledge, near-total employer freedom. After knowledge, serious employer obligation. A cliff, where you'd expect a slope.

When the "performance problem" is the condition itself

The most common version of these cases involves no dramatic crisis at all. It involves attendance. Missed mornings. Write-ups. An employee whose reviews were good for years starts running late, the file starts building, and the termination letter says "absenteeism" — when everyone involved understands that the absences were the depression, or the anxiety, or the OCD.

The leading case is a federal one, Humphrey v. Memorial Hospitals (9th Cir. 2001), and its facts are worth knowing because they repeat everywhere. A medical transcriptionist — by her own reviews an excellent employee — had obsessive-compulsive rituals that made her chronically late. Her employer knew the diagnosis. It tried one accommodation, a flexible start time, and when that didn't work, it denied her request to work from home because her disciplinary record made her ineligible. Then it fired her for absenteeism.

The court's reasoning matters for every case in this family. First: conduct caused by a disability is part of the disability — firing someone for the conduct is firing them for the condition. Second: the duty to accommodate does not end after one failed attempt; when the first accommodation doesn't work, the employer has to keep looking. Third, and this is the trap worth naming: the employer used discipline that the unaccommodated disability had caused as its reason for denying the accommodation that might have fixed the problem. That circular logic appears constantly in these cases, and it loses.

The rule is settled enough in the federal courts that juries there are routinely instructed on it. Its limits sit where the state law's limits sit: threats and violence. The federal courts held that an employee who made serious, repeated threats to kill coworkers was outside the law's protection no matter the source of the threats (Mayo v. PCC Structurals, 2015) — the same line California drew in Wills. And attendance itself can be different where showing up genuinely is the job. A neonatal-intensive-care nurse cannot transcribe from home. But for the ordinary case — the attendance case, the missed-deadline case, the "performance problem" that is actually the condition — the law is far more protective than most people, and many employers, understand. California's own courts have not fully settled how far this principle reaches under state law. On that open question, the federal decisions applying it are persuasive authority — and trial courts and opposing counsel pay attention to them.

Where the law might be going

Now the part that isn't settled law — only where it may be headed.

In 2024 the California Supreme Court decided Bailey — a harassment case, not a disability case. A Black employee, called a vile slur once, by a coworker. For decades, courts tossed cases like hers: it only happened once. The Supreme Court said no. One time can be enough, if it's severe enough. And the Legislature had already written the same philosophy into the statute: judge the whole picture, don't throw these cases out early, one incident can matter.

Is that Husband's situation? No. Bailey asks how bad the conduct was. Husband asks what the employer knew. Different questions, different claims, and Bailey does not decide a case like Husband.

But set the two lines of cases side by side. California has now said, in the strongest terms, that "it only happened once" is not a magic incantation that ends a civil rights case. And yet in the disability context, a single psychiatric crisis — the one day the condition finally becomes visible — legally counts for nothing unless disability was the only possible reading of it. For conditions that are invisible until the day they aren't, that's a rule that protects everyone except the people the statute was written for.

Nobody has tested whether Bailey's spirit reaches the knowledge question. Nobody has established that an employer who watches a crisis has a duty to ask before it fires. Those arguments are unbuilt roads. But the direction of travel in this state is unmistakable — every few years, the Legislature or the Supreme Court widens FEHA's protection and scolds the lower courts for reading it stingily. There is real reason to think the "only reasonable interpretation" rule is not the last word. Somebody's case is going to test that line. It may take a statute. It may take the right facts in front of the right court. But Husband may prove to be the high-water mark of the old thinking, not the foundation of the new.

The can of worms

Disclosing anxiety or depression is not like disclosing a bad back, and the difference isn't in the law — it's in what happens around it. A bad back gets a lifting restriction. A psychiatric disclosure gets remembered. It follows a person into rooms they're no longer invited to, onto projects that quietly reroute, into reviews written by someone who now reads everything they do a little differently. And it can't be unsaid. Once it's out, there's no going back to being the person you were on Tuesday.

The cases treat that calculation as real, because it is. The man in Husband worked twenty months without saying a word, and he presumably had his reasons; most people who stay silent do. And yes — sometimes disclosure does change how people treat you. That's not a reason to stay quiet. That's why half the statute exists: retaliation for asking is itself illegal.

But look at what the silence actually buys. Every protection in this article lives on the far side of disclosure. Stay quiet, and whatever happens to you next is — as Brundage, Featherstone, and Husband just spent three decades showing — mostly legal. Speak, and the ground changes: if the write-ups start, if the good assignments dry up, if they bench you "out of concern," that stops being your private bad luck and becomes your evidence. Disclosure doesn't just trigger their duty to help you. It converts whatever they do to you afterward into a case.

And the disclosure itself is smaller than the word suggests. You don't have to name a diagnosis. Your coworkers don't have to know anything. Medical information is supposed to stay confidential. One sentence to someone with authority — better yet, in writing, so the moment has a date on it — is enough. The law asks no more of you than that. And nothing stops you from talking to a lawyer first, quietly, before you've said anything at work, to think through how and when to say it. That conversation is confidential too, and it costs you nothing but the call.

What this means for you, today

Until that line moves, you live under the law as it is. So here is what that asks of you.

If you're still employed and struggling — say something. Not a speech. Not a diagnosis. A sentence: "I'm dealing with a health condition and I need to talk about an adjustment." One sentence, and it changes your legal position entirely. It's confidential, it requires no magic words, and every protection in the statute turns on it having been said before the paperwork moved.

If you already lost the job — reconstruct what they knew. Did you ever mention a condition, a doctor, a medication, a struggle — to anyone with authority? Did a family member call? Is there an email? The case may live or die there, and people often know more was said than they first remember.

Check your timeline against theirs. When did the write-ups start relative to what they learned? Lin says that sequence is evidence.

Don't assume "concern" was kindness. If they benched you, cut your duties, or pushed you out "for your own good" after learning of a condition — Wallace says that may be the whole case.

The law here is harder and colder than it should be, and the exceptions above show exactly where. But it is also stronger than most people realize — if your employer knew, or if it can be shown that they did. That is usually the first question worth answering, and it takes one conversation to find out.

Cases discussed: Brundage v. Hahn (1997); Prilliman v. United Air Lines (1997); Humphrey v. Memorial Hospitals Association (9th Cir. 2001); Wills v. Superior Court (2011); Mayo v. PCC Structurals (9th Cir. 2015); Wallace v. County of Stanislaus (2016); Featherstone v. Southern California Permanente Medical Group (2017); Lin v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (2023); Bailey v. San Francisco District Attorney's Office (2024); Husband v. Target Corp. (2026); Gov. Code §§ 12923, 12940. Commentary, not legal advice; every case turns on its facts.

Bruce Weisenberg represents employees — only employees — across California (State Bar No. 260521). More than seventeen years in employment law, on his own since 2014, working on contingency. Read about Bruce →  ·  Tell me what happened →