What High-Functioning Depression Looks Like on a Team, and Why I Almost Missed It
Whether at the dinner table or in the boardroom, relationships run on the same patterns. Swati Mukherjee is an International Coaching Federation (ICF)-certified Relationship Coach and Corporate Trainer who spent 15 years in Human Resources (HR) and psychology before founding Resilient Relationship, helping couples and organisations trade conflict for trust and honest communication.
For three months, I told myself she was just someone who liked to stretch her legs. That was the story I built to explain why one of my brightest team members was away from her desk so often, a few minutes here, ten there, several times throughout the day. It was a convenient story. It let me look away.
Then one evening, staying late long after everyone else had gone home, I heard something through a closed door that made the convenient story impossible to believe anymore.
What does depression actually look like at work?
Most of us are looking for the wrong signs. We expect depression to announce itself: someone missing deadlines, snapping at colleagues, showing up late, falling apart visibly enough that HR gets involved. Sometimes it does look like that. But often, it doesn't.
The World Health Organization estimates that 15% of working-age adults were living with a mental disorder in 2019, and that depression and anxiety together cost the global economy an estimated 12 billion working days and US$1 trillion in lost productivity every year. Mental health struggles do not always mean someone has stopped functioning. Some people are still at their desks, still hitting their numbers, still showing up to every meeting.
Psychologists sometimes call this "high functioning depression." It isn't an official diagnosis, but it describes something real: a person who is quietly struggling while still managing to hold down a job, keep their home in order, and pay the bills. Cleveland Clinic compares it to a duck gliding across a pond. On the surface, everything looks graceful and effortless. Underneath, the legs are working furiously just to stay afloat.
That was her, and I nearly missed it entirely.
The girl who was always away from her desk
She was one of those employees who made a manager's job easy. Sharp, likeable, always early with her deliverables. If you'd asked me to name our most reliable person, she would have been near the top of the list.
The absences started small enough that nobody noticed them as a pattern. She'd step away mid-meeting, mid-afternoon, sometimes twice within the hour. Someone joked once that she must be the most restless person on the floor, always up and moving. She laughed along with it. So did I. It became one of those harmless team observations, the kind that gets mentioned and then forgotten, filed away as personality rather than information.
Looking back, that is exactly how it survives. Because nobody notices, but because everybody decides, individually and without discussing it, that it isn't significant enough to mention.
The evening I stayed late
I was in the office past nine one night, finishing a report that couldn't wait until morning. The building was empty except for the cleaning staff and, apparently, her. I heard it before I understood what I was hearing: someone crying, trying hard not to be heard, in the washroom down the hall.
I didn't go in. I didn't know what I would even say. A few minutes later, the door opened. She washed her face at the sink, checked herself in the mirror, and walked out. If I hadn't heard her a few minutes earlier, I would never have known. Her face gave away nothing. Her walk back to her desk was completely ordinary. She picked up exactly where she'd left off.
That is the part that stayed with me longer than the crying itself. Not that she was struggling, but how completely she could put it away.
Why I didn't say anything the next morning
I want to be honest about this part, because I think it's where most well-meaning managers get stuck. I did not march into her office the next day and ask if she was depressed. I didn't have that right, and frankly, I didn't have that certainty. What I had witnessed for thirty seconds through a closed door was not enough to build a conversation on, let alone a diagnosis.
So instead, I watched. Over the following weeks, I started noticing the things that had been there all along, once I knew to look. She was still delivering excellent work, but she'd stopped joining the team for lunch. Her jokes had a slightly rehearsed quality, arriving a beat too quickly, as though she'd learned which moments called for humour and was performing them on cue. She looked tired in a way that no amount of concealer quite covered. The time away from her desk, once I understood what I was actually looking at, read less like restlessness and more like someone searching for the only place in the building where she could stop performing for a few minutes.
None of these signs, on their own, would have told me anything. Together, over time, they told me almost everything.
The trap of the label
Here is the part I think about more than any other, and the reason I never once said the word "depression" to her directly in those early weeks.
We live with labels more than we realise, and once a label attaches itself to us, it can become remarkably difficult to live outside it. Researchers who study this sometimes refer to labelling theory: the idea that mental illness labels can influence how people see themselves and how they expect others to see them. A 2025 paper reviewing existing research on self-labeling proposed that, once people begin to see themselves through the lens of a diagnosis, that label may influence perceived control, self-blame, and other factors linked to clinical outcomes.
I have watched this happen to people I care about. Someone gets told, or tells themselves, that they are "the anxious one" or "the depressed one," and the label stops being a description of a season they're moving through. It becomes an identity they start organising their life around. They stop trying certain things because "that's not something I do, I get too anxious." They stop reaching for certain relationships because "I'm too much when I'm like this." The label, meant to explain a difficulty, quietly becomes a cage.
That is precisely why I was so careful with her. I worried that the moment I said the word out loud, especially as her manager, it would stop being my observation and start becoming part of how she saw herself. I did not want to risk handing her a label she might spend years trying to climb out of. I wanted to be the person who gave her room to name it herself, in her own time, if she ever chose to name it at all.
What I did instead of diagnosing her
I asked her for a coffee, framed around nothing more specific than "I wanted to check in." I told her, honestly, that I'd noticed she seemed tired lately and that I wasn't asking her to explain anything, only that I wanted her to know I'd noticed. Then I stopped talking and let the silence sit there long enough for her to decide what to do with it.
She didn't tell me everything that day. Nobody does. But something in the way I'd approached it, without a clipboard, without the word "depression," without treating this as a problem to be solved in one conversation, seemed to tell her the door was open rather than closing in on her. Over the following weeks, in pieces, she told me more. About the exhaustion that never lifted, no matter how much she slept. About feeling numb through things that used to make her happy. About the washroom being the only place she could let her face fall for a minute before putting it back together.
We adjusted what we could. Lighter days when she needed them. No penalty for the washroom trips that had never actually been the problem. A quiet, standing invitation to talk, with no expectation attached to it. Gently, a suggestion that she speak to someone qualified to actually help her carry what she was carrying, because compassion from a manager is not treatment, and I never wanted her to mistake one for the other.
Five quiet signs someone on your team might be struggling
1. The frequent disappearing act
Regular, unexplained absences from the desk, whether to the washroom, the stairwell, or the car park, are sometimes exactly what they look like. Sometimes they are the only privacy a person has left in an eight-hour day.
2. A performance that feels a little too polished
Someone who has become suspiciously unbothered by everything, who never seems to have a bad day, is not always thriving. Sometimes they have simply gotten very good at not letting it show.
3. Humour that arrives a beat too fast
Jokes and reassurances that come slightly too quickly, before you've even finished asking how they are, can be a sign someone has a rehearsed answer ready because the honest one isn't available for public use.
4. Sudden, almost eerie efficiency
A person who becomes unusually productive, taking on more, staying later, saying yes to everything, may be using work as the one place they still feel in control of anything.
5. Small physical tells
Changes in appetite, sleep, energy, or appearance can be worth noticing, even when the person insists they're fine.
What colleagues can actually do
Do not lead with a diagnosis, even one you're fairly confident about. Naming someone's struggle for them, before they've named it themselves, risks handing them a label they didn't ask for and may not be ready to carry.
Create small pockets of unstructured time. A coffee, a walk, staying five minutes after a meeting ends. Most of the moments that matter don't happen in scheduled one-to-one meetings.
Ask twice. "How are you?" gets a reflexive answer. "How are you, really?" asked with genuine patience for silence afterward, sometimes gets a true one.
Point toward real support rather than trying to become it yourself. Your job is to notice and to care, not to treat. Knowing where your organisation's support resources sit, and mentioning them without pressure, matters more than having the right words.
Follow up more than once. A single conversation rarely changes anything on its own. Consistency is what tells someone the door is still open next week, and the week after that.
The space between noticing and naming
We are still in touch today, even though years have gone by, I have since moved to another country, and neither of us works at that company anymore. I don't know if she would call what she went through depression, high-functioning, or otherwise. I have never asked her to use that word, and I don't intend to. What I do know is that the version of that story where I opened the file for a Performance Improvement Plan instead of staying late that one evening is a version I think about more than I'd like to admit.
That is the part nobody tells you about noticing someone properly: the bond it creates does not expire when the organization chart changes. Job titles end. Companies get left behind. Cities change. But she still messages me on hard days, and I still ask. Whatever else that evening cost either of us, it also built something that outlasted the workplace that prompted it.
Somewhere between noticing that someone is struggling and deciding what to call it, there is a space most workplaces rush straight through. That space is where the actual care happens. Naming things too quickly, especially with a word as heavy as "depression," can close a door that a little patience would have kept open. Sometimes the most useful thing a colleague can offer isn't a diagnosis or a solution. It's simply proof that someone noticed and stayed close enough to keep noticing.
If you are trying to navigate this in your own team, or wondering how to have these conversations without doing more harm than good, let's talk. Book a call with me, and together we'll look at what's really happening beneath the surface, for your team and for you as the person leading it.
Read more from Swati Mukherjee
Swati Mukherjee, Relationship Coach & Corporate Trainer
Swati Mukherjee is an ICF-certified Relationship Coach and Corporate Trainer based in London, working with couples on the edge of separation and workplaces where good people quietly become poor managers. After 15 years in HR and psychology watching the same story repeat in exit interviews, she noticed that people leave relationships, not organisations. That insight became Professional Proximity, her framework for rebuilding trust and communication before they break down completely, taught through Resilient Relationship. Her work continues in Proximity, her newsletter on the relational side of work, and her podcast, Relationship Ironies of the World We Live In.
