Occupational psychological harm

Work can injure a mind as surely as it can injure a back. The injury is just harder to see — including, often, by the person carrying it.

What it is

Occupational psychological harm is harm to your psychological health caused or significantly worsened by work. Sometimes it comes from a single event — an assault, an accident, a public humiliation. More often it accumulates: unsustainable load, impossible expectations, conflict that never resolves, values violated one compromise at a time, support that never comes.

Australian work health and safety law now formally recognises this. Employers are legally required to manage psychosocial hazards — things like excessive job demands, low control, poor support, bullying, harassment, organisational injustice and exposure to traumatic content — the same way they manage physical hazards. That legal recognition matters, because it confirms what injured workers are so often told to doubt: the problem is frequently in the conditions, not in the person.

The forms it takes

Burnout. The state of depletion that follows sustained demands without sustained recovery — exhaustion, cynicism, and a creeping sense of ineffectiveness. Not a motivation problem. A resources problem. Read more →
Moral injury. The deep distress that follows experiencing, witnessing, or being unable to prevent something that violates your values, ethics or sense of who you are. Common in nursing, teaching, care work and emergency services — and almost never named. Read more →
Workplace trauma. Trauma responses arising from events at work — critical incidents, violence, threat — or from sustained interpersonal harm such as bullying, harassment or mobbing.
Chronic occupational stress. The slow version. A nervous system held in threat-response for months or years adapts to survive it — at a rising cost to sleep, mood, memory, relationships and physical health.
Work-related psychological injury. When harm reaches the level of a diagnosable condition, it may be a compensable injury. Some of my clients have WorkCover or insurer claims; many don’t and never will. You do not need a claim for your experience to be real, or to get help. The work we do is the same either way.

These categories overlap, and most people arrive carrying more than one. Part of the first phase of therapy is simply sorting out what you’re actually dealing with — because burnout, moral injury and trauma each ask for a different path through.

How it shows up

Exhaustion that rest doesn’t repair. Dread with a timetable — Sunday evenings, the car park, the sound of email arriving. Going quiet and flat, or wired and unable to stop. Doubting your competence, your memory, your perception. Snapping at the people you love and despising yourself for it. Losing the thread of why you ever cared about this work. The body keeping score: gut, sleep, headaches, getting sick every break.

If you recognise yourself, it’s worth saying plainly: these are not signs of weakness. They are the predictable responses of a nervous system that has been asked to carry too much, for too long, with too little protection.

How I can help

This is the specialist focus of my practice. The work usually moves through three phases, at your pace: first stabilisation — settling the nervous system, restoring sleep and basic capacity, making the current situation survivable; then processing — working through the events, betrayals and value-violations that drive the distress, with approaches including EMDR where trauma is involved; and finally rebuilding — your relationship with work, your boundaries, your sense of self, and a defensible answer to “what now?” Where there’s a claim or a return-to-work process, I work within it without letting it set the clinical agenda.

You don’t need a diagnosis, a claim, or a crisis to start.

Book an appointment

In person at Mooloolaba or telehealth Australia-wide · GPs and referrers: referral information