Psychiatric Disabilities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the New Workplace Violence Account

Abstract

A video game recently hit computer stores, promising killing [s]o freakin' real, your victims actually beg for mercy and scream for their lives!' The game is called Postal and is based on a disgruntled, psychotic postal worker arming himself to the teeth and systematically shooting his way through several different scenarios, including a school yard, a construction site, and a marching band. The victims, primarily innocent, unarmed bystanders, do not die immediately. Instead, the player must decide whether to let victims beg for mercy or execute them immediately. The disgruntled postal worker periodically complains, only my weapon understands me. The makers of the game did not create this image out of whole cloth. The image of the disgruntled postal worker who explodes in senseless, random violence had already entered the popular culture, symbolizing the potential lethality of the psychotic worker. So embedded in popular discourse is this account that newspapers, television programs, movies, attorneys and school children refer to episodes of unexplained, individual violence as going postal.2 The threat of occupational injury or death, once represented by dangerous machinery or hazardous environments, has now become discursively located in conceptions of the pathogenic worker, lurking unnoticed in the workplace, poised to explode in lethal violence against his supervisors or co-workers. We might refer to the set of stories, images, attributions and prescriptions associated with this imagery as the new workplace violence account. This workplace violence account, we will argue, plays a role in attempts to delegitimize the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Deploying vivid