Back in 2019, a Kentucky man's coworkers threw him an office birthday party he didn’t want, and he was fired when he complained. This year, a jury awarded Kevin Berling $450,000 for the ordeal.
Each week on “Something Offbeat,” Audacy digs deeper into unusual news stories like this one to see what we can learn from them.
This week, we explored the reason why Berling didn’t want the party – he suffers from an anxiety disorder – and why people often dismiss the seriousness of mental health conditions.
Host Mike Rogers spoke to Dr. Kevin Chapman, founder and director of the Kentucky Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, about what panic attacks feel like and about society’s attitudes about mental health.
“I think that it’s really important to know that we think about mental health, I think there's still a stigma attached to it,” Chapman said. “In many ways people think that you could just get over conditions like anxiety and whatnot. And that, obviously, is not the case, especially for somebody who has a diagnosable anxiety condition.”
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