When Being Sick Becomes Suspicion

Today, I read about a proposal in Germany that would require employees to provide a doctor’s note from the first day they call in sick.

As someone living with a disability in Germany, my first reaction wasn’t surprise. It was exhaustion.

This proposal touches something I live with every day: navigating systems that often make me feel invisible. At times, they make me feel distrusted. Even writing those words feels heavy, but they come from years of living in a body shaped by traumatic brain injury, chronic pain, PTSD, and the ongoing work of recovery.

Every week, I attend physical therapy and bodywork. Much of that work is not just about healing my body, but about releasing the panic, fear, and anger that accumulated from trying to survive inside systems that rarely make room for illness. In that way, my body carries what words often cannot.

Living with a fluctuating disability has taught me that our bodies are not machines. We are living beings whose capacities change from day to day. Some days we can give more. Other days, our bodies ask us to slow down, rest, or simply survive.

Policies that treat illness primarily as something to be verified or policed send a troubling message: they turn sickness into suspicion instead of care.

The justification is often economic. We are told these measures will strengthen productivity or improve efficiency. But the real question is: productivity for whose benefit?

If we truly wanted a healthier economy, we would begin somewhere entirely different. We would ensure everyone had enough to live on, for example, through a universal basic income. We would create conditions where people could recover without fearing financial ruin. We would recognize that care, rest, and meaningful work are not obstacles to a healthy society—they are its foundation.

It feels remarkably easy to blame workers for supposedly taking advantage of sick leave. It is much harder to build systems that trust people, value care, and recognize that illness is part of being human.

I know I am a foreigner in Germany. Some might say these are not my systems to critique. But I have lived here long enough, and I have lived here as someone who has become disabled while navigating them. I know what it feels like to be doubted, to struggle financially because of chronic illness, and to spend enormous amounts of energy simply accessing medical care.

Ironically, I experienced another example of this today.

I had an appointment with my general practitioner for ongoing swelling and pain in my legs. When I arrived, the receptionist confirmed that my appointment existed, but because the reason for the visit had not been entered into the system, I was turned away and given another appointment in two weeks after waiting for two weeks. No one asked whether the issue was urgent. No one tried to solve the problem. A missing line in a computer became more important than the person standing in front of it.

Experiences like this are not unusual. They are part of a growing list of encounters that leave me wondering how a healthcare system already under significant strain would absorb even more people needing same-day appointments just to obtain employer documentation.

Perhaps this proposal will make visible something disabled and chronically ill people have long known: being sick is not only physically difficult. It is administratively exhausting.

We often speak about collective liberation. But a society reveals its values by how it treats those who are most vulnerable. If we build systems that make illness harder to navigate for disabled and chronically ill people today, those same systems will eventually affect everyone. In that sense, disability and illness are not identities reserved for a few—they are possibilities that accompany every human life.

The question is not whether we will all need care.

The question is what kind of society we want waiting for us when we do.