What is it about?
Injured employees who file a claim for workers' compensation are often unprepared for the innately adversarial relationship of the process. The results can range from hurt and disappointment to real trauma. Instead of the care and sympathy that they may hope for and expect in their suffering, they may instead be treated with skepticism and suspicion, withholding of necessary care, and medical professionals whose mission is not to provide diagnosis and treatment, but to determine if the patient is malingering and/or to minimize the patient's damage and poke holes in the patient's narrative. Being subjected to that experience and set of experiences can have devastating psychological effects for people who are already feeling fragile and are in pain.
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Why is it important?
Mental health providers need to understand the realities of the psychological challenges their patients face when they have been injured at work, as often these works seek mental health treatment as a result of their injuries -- either because the injury itself involved trauma, they are left depressed by the pain and inability to work or function fully in their daily lives, and/or the aftermath of seeking help.
Perspectives
Until I began working with workers who had been injured on the job and were dealing with the workers' compensation system, I had no idea of the many forms of psychological stress it imposes on claimants. My own ignorance convinced me that other psychotherapists also would have had little exposure to this kind of experience and could benefit from learning about it.
Ruth Fallenbaum Fallenbaum
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Injured Worker, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, January 2003, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/15240650409349216.
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