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Totally agree with Humayun and the Davids' comments, don't get me wrong. I have close family members that suffer from it and know what a terrible illness it is. But also agree with the comments about the insurance companies would do more than just base a case on that one photo. They're not that dumb. My view on the article is that the media latched onto the more sensational part of the story and the part about the rest of their background check has been skimmed over.
I'd also like to add a story from my company and about facebook, but not related to depression. I'll be careful about my wording here. Myself and my business partner are interviewing for a couple of new staff at the moment. Unbeknown to me, after one interview of a candidate that I was extremely happy with and was going to recommend making an offer to, our admin jumped on facebook to search out this candidate's profile/background. I was shocked. This is not our company's policy, I did not ask for it to be done, and would have stopped it before it was done if I'd known about it beforehand.
The candidate's FB page had maybe a dozen photos there. All were normal photos you'd expect to see on a FB page. Having fun, with friends etc. Heck, I have (or rather, had) photos on my FB page worse than those. But there was one photo with this candidate in a not-too-flattering pose with a cigarette in the mouth. Guess which photo the admin printed out and handed to me.
The photo was thrown in the bin and not considered. The admin was asked why this was even carried out without instruction. We've made an offer on that candidate and they've accepted. So it all ended happily in that case.
But the point is, what if we weren't that open-minded. This person could have shot him/her self in the foot by doing nothing more than having a FB page with some photos on it.
First thing I did was go through my FB photos, even ones where I'd been "tagged" from other people's photos at parties where I'd had a few to drink and the photo didn't look professional. I'm seriously considering closing my FB account after only being on it for a couple of months. Not just because of this, but it certainly could be the straw that broke the camel's back.
So my advice is, be careful of what photos you put there, even the ones where friends have tagged you (you can disallow the tagging BTW), and think before you click "post" or "send" on anything you post on the internet in general. Make sure you would stand behind what you are saying, no matter who reads it. You just don't know who is watching/reading.
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