Paris (AFP)

"An employer told me + it's a bullshit, it does not exist your disease +: like Victoria, a majority of workers with disabilities suffer from a disability said invisible and sometimes fear to talk about not to suffer the misunderstanding of colleagues or recruiters.

Head trauma, deafness, bipolar disorder, back problems ... The invisible disability, which by definition is not apparent, covers a wide spectrum.

Eight out of ten people with disabilities have it, according to the Association for the Social and Professional Integration of People with Disabilities (Ladapt).

"You can be touched by an invisible disability as a result of cancer, a car accident, because the work has damaged you ... There are also all the psychic diseases", explains to the AFP Kristel Hamon, communication director of the Association for the management of the fund for the professional integration of people with disabilities (Agefiph).

This reality is at the heart of the week for the employment of people with disabilities that opens Monday. Objective: to raise awareness of unknown situations, in a context of high unemployment rate of workers with disabilities, more than twice the national average (about 18% against 8.6%).

For Françoise Descamps-Crosnier, president of the national committee of the Fund for the Integration of Disabled People in the Public Service (FIPHFP), invisible disabilities are "often ignored and misunderstood", and generate "exclusion in training courses and insertion ".

Hence the difficulty of talking about it. "We do not start the working relationship with this, but the question arises, especially during the job interview," says Kristel Hamon.

Victoria Lahouel, 27, who suffers from hypersomnia, a disorder characterized by excessive drowsiness, has experienced the exclusion that can result. After years of "galley", she landed a position as a cashier host in a supermarket in Châtillon (Hauts-de-Seine). She spoke of her invisible disability throughout her job search, wiping out discriminatory remarks.

"Once, an employer told me + it's bullshit, it does not exist your disease +, I had to prove it with an official document," she laments.

- "Some understood, some did not" -

The incomprehension caused by the invisible disability can be explained by the lack of consensus on what this expression encompasses, according to Sabine Lucot of the Friends of the Workshop Foundation. Above all, "two people who suffer from the same pathology will not have the same needs," she says.

Because of her disability, Victoria Lahouel is allowed to take several 30-minute daily breaks. Faced with her colleagues, who are entitled to only fifteen minutes break twice a day, she felt compelled to justify this "advantage". "Some have understood, others do not," she notes.

Prejudices are hard-skinned: only 21% of employees consider that a worker with a disability related to cognitive disorders is "rather easy" to join a company, according to the latest Handicap Barometer IFOP Agefiph.

However, Eztitxu Albitsur believes that it is important to talk about one's disability in the workplace. Currently looking for funds for a thesis project in physiotherapy, this 34-year-old woman suffers from hemiplegia on the left which, by dint of care, is no longer seen.

"You have to talk about it to protect yourself, but also to warn others, and if you do not do it sooner or later, it will end up happening," she says.

© 2019 AFP