A fair question, how do I know I was not imagining those things at work?

I had physical evidence like someone leaving a photoshopped picture of me in a print out as Herman Munster. Someone would lower my chair before I got into work and I had to raise it back up. My files would be all messed up every day and I had to put them back in order in my filing cabinet. I brought a tape recorder with me to record the noises so I could play it back for my wife who isn't schizophrenic to see if she heard the same noises and voices that I did, and she did.

The problem is that a court would see it that way you suggest as well that I could be 'imagining' the harassment and bullying, which is why I had to collect evidence to prove otherwise.

Also schizoaffective disorder does not always have a schizophrenic cycle it can have a depressed cycle, manic cycle, normal cycle, I would not always imagine things or hear things. This was a constant going on and if it was my mental illness making me imagine these things it would only last for two weeks and then cycle out.

As to why they targeted me, they didn't understand the mental illness (schzioaffective disorder is a poorly understood mental illness that hardly anyone has heard of) and saw it as a sign of weakness, and saw me as a bad person for being mentally ill that they were better off without. I was not into office politics nor was I in any of their social kliks, they decided to get rid of me and got their political allies and social klik in on it.

I had also sort of made myself a target, I stood up for others who got bullied and harassed. There was another programmer and someone discovered he had another man's name on the check he used to pay for the office water supply (they collected checks to pay for water delivery) and then some of the employees bullied and harassed him for being gay. I stood up and told them that another man's name might be on the check because it is a business partner or maybe an apartment room mate and it doesn't automatically make someone gay, and besides there are employment laws in the city we worked that protect people from discrimination for sexual orientation. After that I was made fun of, they said I might be gay as well. They decided to not help that programmer and shut him off, so I decided to help him with projects when he got stuck or needed advice. That made me even more of a target.

In certain circumstances, people smell blood like sharks. If you're a 'normal' and successful person, with a functioning ego, you will either naturally or semi-consciously put out a vibe that lets other people know you're going to hold your own. Your personality and sense of humor will interact in some reasonable way that strikes a balance with the egos of others. With mental illness, it's as if people smell it on you. You become a target. People sense your vulnerability, and they can become angry with it, attack it as if they're attacking the spectre of insecurities or uncomfortable truths in their own shadow-selves. The fact that people will use the socially plausible explanation of your mental illness to explain away such bullying becomes one of the impossible double-binds that mentally ill people live with. One man's analysis.

I can show this in this thread, and I assume the people are not even aware of it that wrote it. There seems to be a common theme that if a person like me is mentally ill, I must be imagining the harassment and bullying, and because I am mentally ill I am not valuable anymore and should be given a lower position and lower salary.

I mean the people who wrote those things don't really mean me any harm, and they are not technically harassing me or bulling me. But they misunderstand that if a person is mentally ill they are a liability, they will do less work, be less productive, they will imagine things and all the stress is in their head, and they have a lessor value than someone who is not mentally ill so they should be demoted for it.

Yes there is a semi-consciously bias here, and over time it grows into a mind-set, and when a group is using group-think they will gang up against such a person using the bias that because he/she is mentally ill, it makes things worse for us, so they have to do whatever they can to get rid of that person.

I cannot hide my mental illness, I don't have the 'passing skill' which is acting like a normal person and blending in. I don't have very much in the way of social skills because the mental illness affects the part of the brain that controls social skills and sometimes I don't get social clues. It is not the same as Asperger's Syndrome but it will make some people think that I have that. The mental illness affects the speech center of my brain and from time to time I mispronounce words accidentally and have a speaking tick that others make fun of. For example for breakfast at a meeting that had bagels and butter I asked "Can you please pass me the butter." but I mispronounced butter only to have a few people mock me saying "Butter, butter, butter" and laughing.

Yes they are like sharks who smell blood.

If I ever do go back to work, it will have to be the right company, with the right people, and the right management that does do things that ones in the past have done. One that does not discriminate against the mentally ill.

Imagine if instead of becoming mentally ill, I became blind instead. "Well Orion because you are blind now, you don't have as much value as a programmer than someone who has sight. So we are going to demote you and lower your salary to a position you will be able to handle." instead of "Orion we will help you by installing software that converts text to speech for your PC and other equipment to get you back into programming."