We Don’t Treat Addiction Like a Disability. We Treat It Like a Character Flaw. And It’s Costing People Their Jobs.

By Lisa Carr, CCP® | CompAlchemist

Let me ask you something uncomfortable.

If an employee comes to you with a cancer diagnosis, you mobilize. You activate the leave process, you connect them to benefits, you check in regularly, you document everything carefully. You are the HR professional you were trained to be.

Now that same employee comes to you and discloses a substance use disorder.

What happens next?

For a lot of HR professionals—and I say this having lived in this field for nearly two decades—what happens next looks nothing like the cancer scenario. It looks like discomfort. Hesitation. A conversation that gets shorter than it should be. Documentation that somehow never gets started. A process that stalls because nobody wants to touch it.

And the employee? They walk out of your office less supported than when they walked in.

The Law Doesn’t Care About Your Discomfort

Here’s what I need you to understand before we go any further:

Addiction is a protected ground under human rights legislation in Canada. It is a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States. The duty to accommodate applies. Full stop.

That means your obligation to an employee disclosing a substance use disorder is legally identical to your obligation to an employee disclosing a physical disability. Same standard. Same documentation requirements. Same good-faith process.

Not “similar.” Not “comparable.” Identical.

And yet, the gap between how we handle physical disability accommodations and how we handle addiction accommodations is, in most organisations, enormous.

This Is a Moral Failure Dressed Up as Process

I want to name what’s actually happening, because I’ve sat in enough boardrooms and HR offices to know that most people won’t say it out loud.

We treat addiction differently because, somewhere beneath our professional veneer, a lot of us still believe it’s a choice.

We believe the cancer patient is a victim. We believe the person with a substance use disorder made a series of decisions that led them here. And even if we’d never say that in a meeting, it lives in the gap between the accommodation process we execute for one and the one we stumble through for the other.

The science does not support this belief. The law does not support this belief. And the human being sitting across from you—who gathered every ounce of courage they had to walk into your office and tell you the truth—does not deserve to pay for it.

There Are Two Kinds of HR Professionals

I’ve come to believe there are two distinct types of HR professionals—and the difference between them has nothing to do with credentials or years of experience.

The first type is great at HR when there’s nothing truly difficult on the table. They handle onboarding beautifully. They run smooth performance cycles. They write excellent policies. When the work is clean and the situations are clear, they’re exceptional.

The second type is great at HR when everything is on fire.

When the situation is messy. When the employee is crying. When the manager is panicking. When the legal risk is real. When the human stakes are higher than any policy document anticipated. That’s when the second type steps forward—and everyone else steps back.

Substance use disclosures are a fire moment.

They require you to manage your own discomfort while simultaneously managing theirs. They require you to activate a process that, if you’re honest with yourself, you probably haven’t practised as many times as you’ve practised a performance improvement plan. They require you to be the HR professional you say you are—not just the one you are when things are easy.

What Getting It Wrong Actually Looks Like

Let me walk you through what inadequate accommodation of substance use disorders typically looks like—because it rarely looks like overt discrimination. It looks like process failure.

• The employee discloses. The HR professional responds with sympathy but no next steps. The conversation ends without a clear accommodation process being initiated.

• The employee goes on leave — informally, without proper documentation — because nobody formalised the process.

• The employee returns. Nobody has established return-to-work conditions. Nobody has discussed what supports are in place. Nobody has documented anything.

• Six months later, performance issues surface. The manager acts. HR now has to navigate a termination involving an employee with a documented disability—without a single piece of paper proving the accommodation process was handled correctly.

• The human rights complaint arrives. And HR loses. Not because they meant to discriminate—but because the process was never followed.

This is not hypothetical. This is Tuesday.

What Getting It Right Actually Requires

Getting this right requires three things working simultaneously:

1. Personal awareness. You need to know your own bias before you walk into that room. Because it will be there. The question is whether you manage it or let it manage you.

2. Legal fluency. You need to know your jurisdiction’s obligations cold. In Canada, that means understanding the duty to accommodate under provincial human rights codes and the Canadian Human Rights Act. In the US, it means the ADA, FMLA, and relevant state laws. These are not optional frameworks—they are legal obligations.

3. Process discipline. You need a structured, documented accommodation process that you follow every single time—regardless of how you feel about the situation, the employee, or the substance involved.

None of these are complicated in theory. All of them are hard in practice when you’re sitting across from someone in crisis and you’re running on gut instinct instead of a system.

This Is the HR Work That Actually Matters

Any HR professional can process a standard leave request. Any HR professional can onboard a new hire or run an engagement survey.

The HR professional who can sit with an employee in one of the most vulnerable moments of their life—hold space for their humanity, activate the right process, document it correctly, advocate for appropriate accommodation, and protect the organisation legally all at the same time—that is a different calibre of professional entirely.

That’s the standard we should all be holding ourselves to.

Not just when it’s easy. Especially when it isn’t.

A Resource for HR Professionals

I’m currently developing the Addiction & Recovery Navigator—a structured, step-by-step decision tool for HR professionals managing substance use disclosures and accommodations. Built for both Canadian and US jurisdictions. If this is an area where your team needs more support, visit compalchemist.com to be notified when it launches.

Expert-built. AI-powered. Unmistakably human.