The night before he was due back at the office, a 30-year-old JPMorgan software developer lay awake in bed. 'The best way I can describe it,' he said, 'is I got time away from a toxic family member. When you have separation, it's easy to forget how much you hated work.'
He had spent six months on leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act — a federal law that guarantees eligible employees up to 12 weeks a year of job-protected leave for a serious health condition, or to care for a spouse, child, or parent with one. He was not dealing with a life-threatening illness. He was feeling 'stuck' at work. He didn't like his manager. He didn't feel his contributions mattered at a multitrillion-dollar bank.
He had been planning to quit without another job lined up. Then a colleague told him that 'burnout' alone could qualify him for FMLA.
Burnout is not a recognized diagnosis under FMLA. But as Cassandra Lammers, a senior HR executive who has led leave policy at large employers including The New York Times and Audible, told reporter Maya Sulkin: 'The bar for FMLA is quite low.' If a healthcare provider certifies that an underlying condition — anxiety, depression — requires ongoing treatment, approval typically follows.
The result, Sulkin reports, is a growing cohort of workers who no longer see mental-health leave as a last resort. They see it as compensation. Employees have used FMLA-protected leave to care for sick parents, yes — but also to travel to Bali and pursue careers as influencers.
Federal law does not require the leave to be paid. But many states, including New York and California, offer partial wage replacement. Some companies, JPMorgan among them, extend leave benefits beyond the federally guaranteed three months. The gap between what the law intended and what it now delivers is, in practice, a subsidized break from a job you have decided you no longer enjoy.
Say it plainly: the FMLA was designed to protect workers facing genuine medical crises — a cancer diagnosis, a parent's surgery, a newborn who needs care. The record shows it is now being used, with the quiet assistance of compliant healthcare providers, to paper over ordinary workplace dissatisfaction. The 'serious health condition' has become a flexible concept.
Follow the incentive, not the press release. When the cost of leaving a job you dislike can be shifted onto an employer — and partially onto state wage-replacement programs funded by taxpayers — more people will make that choice. The trade-off is real: companies absorb the productivity loss and the administrative burden; states absorb part of the wage bill; and the worker takes a sabbatical the law never promised. What is eroding here is not just an HR policy. It is the premise that benefits exist to address genuine hardship — and that the distinction between hardship and inconvenience still means something.
