Crippling workload: mental illness in the Australian workplace

Mental illness is now the main reason Australian workers take extended sick leave or become incapacitated. The costs are estimated to be close to $10 billion a year and growing, and reforms are being held back by stigma and prejudice. Di Martin reports.

Mental illness is now the main reason for incapacitation in Australian workers, according to new research* due to be published by leading psychiatrist and researcher Sam Harvey.

‘Almost across the board mental health is now the main reason for people not being able to work.  Either a long-term sickness absence, or on incapacity benefits,’ Dr Harvey told Background Briefing. 

His work with UNSW and the Black Dog Institute shows that the days physical injuries were the main concern in workplaces are gone.

‘If we look at incapacity benefits, where an individual is so unwell that they are unlikely to work again in the foreseeable future—over the last 10 years the number of incapacity benefits for mental health, both as an absolute number and relative proportion of all incapacity benefits, has been slowly increasing,’ said Dr Harvey.

In the second of two programs on mental health in the workplace,Background Briefing investigates the case of Victorian high school teacher Peter Doulis, who has recently been awarded $1.3 million in damages in a landmark case before the state’s Supreme Court. 

The court heard that Mr Doulis’ mental health deteriorated after being given an unfair workload of very difficult and at times violent students, including one who constructed a flamethrower at school.

The judge found Mr Doulis will never work again after the school ignored his pleas for help and failed to adjust his teaching schedule.

It is understood that before going to trial Mr Doulis offered to settle for $250,000, a fifth of the final payout. Yet the Victorian Workcover Authority pursued the matter through court and has not appealed the judgement.

Background Briefing also spoke at length with a Federal Court judge about his own battle with depression on the bench and the problem of high rates of mental illness in the law. 

Justice Shane Marshall spoke openly about how work has contributed to his illness, related instances of bullying in the courtroom and described how top tier law firms are driving their younger lawyers so hard they are developing mental illness.

Last week, Background Briefing looked at suicides and psychological injury in the medical field. The highest risk industries are prison officers, police, train drivers, emergency workers and others dealing with traumatic situations. 

This week, the program finds the problem of mental illness at work extends across all industries.

There are worrying trends in mental stress workers compensation cases. While claims for physical injuries are falling across the board, psychological injury claims aren’t budging.  These include claims related to illnesses like depression, anxiety and PTSD developed because of work conditions.

According to Dr Harvey, mental illness now accounts for about 10 per cent of all workers compensation claims, yet those claims chew up a third of budgets. 

Psychological injury claims are far more expensive than physical cases, primarily because of long recovery times.

Head of data analysis from Safe Work Australia, Fleur De Crespigny says there’s ‘a massive difference’ between the two.

‘A serious claim for a mental disorder typically involved 14.2 weeks lost from work. Where is the typical serious injury or musculoskeletal disorder claim involved 4.8 weeks lost from work,’ Ms De Crespigny said.

‘The median compensation paid for a mental disorder in 2010-11 was $22,900. While the median compensation paid for all serious claims in the same year was only $8300. So it’s almost three times more expensive.’

Professor Tony La Montagne from Deakin University says the total burden of mental illness in the workforce is far greater than the amount paid out in compensation claims. 

‘Costs [are] sickness absence, turnover… retraining people [and] presenteeism, [which] means you are at work but you're not working at full capacity. So I think what is in the claims is only the tip of the iceberg.’

Professor La Montagne says there’s huge stigma attached to making a worker’s compensation claim. So for every claim there are thirty other cases of depression caused by job strain.

‘[Job strain] is the combination of being and a high demand job with little control about how to get the job done,’ said Professor La Montagne. ‘That's about 20 to 22 per cent of working women, and about 18 per cent of men, and it is higher in women because women tend to be in lower control jobs.

‘We can estimate, just from job strain, there are approximately 21,000 cases of depression in the Victorian working population. How many claims are there? Seven hundred times less.’

There are various measures of the total cost of mental illness in the workforce.

The Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance has estimated Australian business loses $10.9 billion a year and 1 in 5 workers are affected.  

Professor La Montagne says that like asbestos, mental health in the workplace has been largely invisible, and is often ignored as a health and safety problem.  The difference between the two is the size of the mental health issue. 

‘I would say that it is much bigger than asbestos,’ he said.

‘Asbestos is a terrible story as any listener will know, but it did tend to affect a small percentage of the working population.’

‘With mental health in the workplace, things like job control, demands, workload, job security; those things can affect every single working person. We’re not talking about a fraction of the population here, we're talking about the whole working population. And much of it still going unnoticed.’

*Harvey SB et al (in prep). Are Australians becoming more mentally ill? Results from the Australian National Health Surveys between 2001 and 2011.

Published on www.abc.net/radionational