Psychological injury and return to work
Recovering from a psychological injury is hard enough. Doing it while a claim, an employer and a return-to-work plan all move around you is a different kind of hard.
What a work-related psychological injury is
A work-related psychological injury is psychological harm caused or significantly worsened by work that has reached the point of a diagnosable condition — often an adjustment disorder, an anxiety or depressive condition, or a trauma-related condition.
It might follow one event: an assault, a serious incident, something you witnessed and cannot put down. More often it follows months of it — bullying that no one stopped, a workload that never eased, an investigation that ran for a year, a manager who made every day a calculation.
Some people in this position lodge a WorkCover or insurer claim. Many never do, and never will. You do not need a claim for the injury to be real or for the work we do to be the same.
If you are still working out what has happened to you, workplace psychological harm is the wider picture. Burnout and moral injury have their own pages.
When the process becomes part of the injury
This is the part almost no one is prepared for.
A claim means describing the worst of it to people you have never met, more than once, in writing. Waiting on decisions you cannot influence. Being assessed. Sometimes being disbelieved, or feeling that you were. Money becomes uncertain at precisely the moment your capacity to earn has dropped. Contact from your workplace either stops altogether, which has its own meaning, or arrives in a way that sets your heart going before you have opened it.
None of that is the original injury. All of it lands on the same nervous system.
There is a term for this in Australian work health and safety research — secondary psychological injury: new or worsening mental health symptoms that emerge during a claim. Research commissioned by Safe Work Australia points to uncertainty about the process, financial pressure, unclear expectations about recovery, and unsupportive interactions along the way. How it should best be defined and screened for is still being worked out nationally.
It is worth naming, because people so often read their own deterioration as evidence that something is wrong with them, or that they were never really injured in the first place. Sometimes the deterioration reflects the additional strain of the process itself, rather than simply a worsening of the original injury.
Part of the work is keeping these two things apart, so that the strain of the system does not get mistaken for the injury, and the injury does not get lost underneath the paperwork.
Why going back can feel impossible
People often expect the fear to be vague. Usually it is very specific.
The car park. The particular corridor. A name in a meeting invitation. The first time someone asks how you have been. The possibility of seeing the person who was involved. Whether anyone believes you. Whether it will happen again, and whether anything has actually changed.
Avoidance can bring short-term relief, but over time it can make the workplace feel increasingly difficult to approach. That is not the whole story, though. Sometimes the wariness is accurate — the conditions have not changed, and the caution is doing its job. Part of the work is telling those two apart rather than assuming either one.
Meanwhile the dread often arrives well before the day itself: Sunday evenings, the night before a meeting, the moment the roster comes out.
Those patterns can be worked with in therapy. They tend to respond better to being taken apart into their specific pieces than to being braced against as one large unbearable thing.
What a return needs to take into account
A psychologically sustainable return needs to take more into account than hours and duties.
Depending on your situation, that might mean looking at how much capacity you are actually going back with, which specific situations you are most worried about, what you will say when someone asks where you have been, and what you might do on a difficult day other than go home. It also matters what has genuinely changed at work and what has not — because if the conditions that contributed to the injury are still in place, that belongs in the picture rather than being something to work around.
Where a rehabilitation provider or case manager is involved, I can provide treating-practitioner input into return-to-work planning that is realistic about both your capacity and the workplace’s part in it.
Returning, or moving on
Some people return to the same workplace. Some do not. Some go back for a period and later move elsewhere, and some eventually change profession altogether.
Whichever way it goes, the work does not stop at the decision. What happened still needs somewhere to go. Confidence often needs rebuilding before an interview rather than after one. And for some people the larger question is not the next job but whether they still want the work itself — which deserves more room than a decision made while exhausted.
How we would work on this
Sessions are online, Australia-wide, by secure video or phone — which for many people is the difference between starting now and waiting until they feel able to sit in a waiting room.
We would begin with a clear picture of what happened and where you are now, rather than a re-telling that costs you the rest of the week. From there the focus follows your situation: reducing distress, processing what happened, managing the ongoing demands of a claim or an investigation, rebuilding function, or preparing for a return. Where it fits, I draw on EMDR, Schema Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Compassion-Focused Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Common questions
Do I need a WorkCover claim to see you?
No. Most people I see with work-related psychological harm never lodge one. Appointments can be private, Medicare-rebated with a GP referral and a Mental Health Treatment Plan, or funded through other arrangements. See Fees.
Can you write my work capacity certificate?
No — psychologists do not issue them. In Queensland a work capacity certificate comes from an AHPRA-registered medical doctor, a nurse practitioner for minor injury, or a dentist for oral injury. In practice, yours comes from your treating doctor.
My claim has been declined, or is no longer funding treatment. Can I still see you?
Yes. Appointments can continue privately, or through another funding arrangement you are eligible for. See Fees.
Do you provide reports?
Where reporting forms part of your funding arrangement, yes, within agreed timeframes. GPs, rehabilitation providers and insurers can find the practical detail on the referrer page.
I am not ready to go back. Is it too early for therapy?
No. Therapy can begin well before a return is imminent, including working with the distress, triggers and concerns that make returning feel difficult.
Online appointments, Australia-wide · Read more on workplace psychological harm and burnout · About Suzanne Robertson · GPs and referrers: referral information