If your job makes you want to kill yourself, are you a "direct threat" to your own safety?

In what has to be one of the weirdest ADA cases I've seen, a woman (let's call her "Gladys") was hired as a temp for a tech company in Seattle (let's call it "Initech"). A month later, Initech brought Gladys on as a regular employee. A month after that, Gladys told Initech that she suffered from chronic pain. Initech was like, hey, no problem, we will try to accommodate you.

Um, yeah. That'd be terrific.

Gladys was put on a reduced schedule and was eventually authorized to return to work full-time. Initech assigned her to a shift that ran from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Gladys didn't care for those hours. She told a manager that the schedule was stressing her out and depressing her. Then she sent the manager a Facebook message and said that she was spending the whole day at work trying to think of ways to . . . kill herself.

Because Gladys's suicidal ideations were related to her job, Initech (reasonably) determined that she might be a "direct threat" to her own safety if she continued to work there. She claimed in other postings that she had "PTSD*" and felt like her workplace was a "war zone."