Coming up to thirteen minutes past five I have on the phone this morning two GB commentator doctor Tanvia Ahmed. Let's talk about the psychological compensation claims about being about justice and not about health. That's the story that we want to wear lambrade on and can you tell us more details about that.
Look right across the country and probably across the western world, probably the last decade or two, these sort of psychological claims in the workplace have gone up a great deal, most specifically in New South Wales. They've quad rupled in the last five years and that's really where it ruds to.
So there's currently a bill in New Southwest Parliament essentially trying to stick a pin in this, try and really cut down on the huge growth which is effectively bankrupting the state to some extent, like they're kind of billions of dollars in the red. But what I'm getting at it's something I have to assess. I've never to assess these claims. And by the claims, there's usually someone saying I felt bullied or i felt mistreated, or I've been harassed or I've got looked over in a promotion for
personal reasons. So it's all these sort of things. And now I'm not saying these things aren't happening, but there's a few trends that are driving this. So one mental health awareness, so yes, people are much more conscious of mental health problems. There's also our relationship with work people. We have more service oriented work, so it's work where we're sitting in on front of a computer, we're interacting with teams. The psychosocial side of work, you could argue,
is more pronounced. It's more about kind of online interactions. It's more it's how you get on with the team, a lot more subjective stuff. So that's another dynamic. And in line with that, you've had this huge growth with these types of claims. You've had also argue there's been a change in our relationship with adversity. So even the way we view adversity, it's probably more people thinking, Okay,
the problem, somebody's done this to me. So people have some sort of issue work and they're like, somebody's done this to me. I'm just building up these broader cultural trends because I think they feed into these workplace claims. Now, when we assess the reality with these claims, even though they're mental health claims. They don't respond to treatment like
mental health claims. So you might have to get a diagnosis out of the police of post traumatic stress disorder, but the usual portion of people with that diagnosis, you know, there might be half the people might respond to treatment. However, when you have these sort of claims coming out of the workplace, suddenly the claims and the treatment responses are less.
They don't respond quite as well. Now it's a variety of reasons, but what I'm arguing here is what's really going on here is often people feel wrong at work in some ways, you know, they feel mistreated in some form, and then it really becomes the dynamic is one about justice, resentment, even honor and shame. I feel you don't really think talk about honor shame in Western societies much. You know,
it feels really ancient. You know, it's kind of warrior or kind of romans or tribes and this sort of stuff. But in some ways that's sort of what's going on. People feel they've been dishonored in a way and they just get stuck. They're kind of in exile. They go into a self imposed exile, and then it almost doesn't matter you're throwing them treatments, you're doing counseling, all this kind of stuff. But till they feel they get some sort of resolution, and again that's a kind of a
justice type thing, they just don't get better. So really, what I'm arguing here, Phil is we need to think about these claims differently. So a lot of the debate that's going in early access to treatment. Yes they do to some extent. If they do get in to see a psychologists, it can help them reappraise what's going on for them, Like whatever issue happened to work, what does it mean to them? Can they readjust can they think
of it differently? So that is useful, But what you really got to work on is can we find interesting ways of mediating workplace disputes rather than it go down this real combative route. What tends to happen is back they go to some industrial relations commission and it becomes
a combat straight away. So initially somebody might come out going, oh, I'm a bit pissed off that they didn't do X y Z for me, and they'll go on leave, go on to workers comp claim and then bang, before you know it, it's turned into a kind of all out legal combat. Like both sides have got lawyers. It's gone to some sort of commission. It's a fair work claim, and what began is something relatively mild turns into kind of, you know, like some David Goliath sort of mettle.
I've got two schools of thoughts on this. One is that having been in a situation where I've been bullied at work, and I know that PTSD gets bandied around a lot. We've talked about HR on this show, and how HR is there to essentially protect the employer. There should be some recourse if you've been bullied and you've actually walked away and you know that you have some
form of issue as a result of it. But there are also people who are the architects in the workplace of their own circumstances, who are trying to claim that they're the victim. I guess the thing is to differentiate between what's actually true and what is their version of the truth.
Now, that's an awfully hard thing to do because it's often one person's perception versus another, and they try and we try and get some sort of objective reality, which isn't always which isn't always easy, and there is. My profession does probably add to it because we've got all these diagnoses, and sometimes they're fairly loose criteria, so people
can latch onto a diagnosis. You mentioned PTSD. I think increasingly the growth of PTSD is linked to lacking language for at city, and that can be useful sometimes it can help them make sense of it seek treatment. But obviously people have to have recourse. Like you know, all sorts of things go wrong in work and nobody's arguing the worker shouldn't have rights, but something's going wrong in these disputes that they're just getting completely stuck and framing
them purely as a health sort of dispute. I think just misses a trick. It just doesn't quite get the dynamic in these disputes.
But I also think sometimes you just want to be heard, don't necessarily want some kind of compensation. You know, most people just want someone to hear their grievances.
Yeah, you're spot onto. I think that people need to feel acknowledged. So again trying to think of processes where and again the legal thing can make it hard where they're so fearful of admitting some sort of liability that modern organizations often can't even allow space where someone gets acknowledged where they're feeling of you being you know, mistreated in some way or just being disrespected. Often it's a feeling of disrespect and yeah, what you said is exactly right.
Is there some way we can acknowledge that they felt wronged? We need some sort of ritual that allows them to come back to work save face. But I don't think we're doing that well. That things are turning into real big legal battles.
I get the impression that HI will panic if somebody goes to them with a complaint about you know, it's usually a boss, but also a fellow employee. First thing they're going to do is think, well, okay, where's this going to leave us? And I think that mentality has got to go out of the equation that you're going to have to have someone whose job is not just to protect the company, but to protect the mental health of the company.
That's true. I think there's a much more awareness of that psychosocial risk bield. So you're right, and I think we can handle it better. But in the most fundamental thing now, arguably the government's going too far in New South Wales. Whether they're kind of almost trying to shut this out altogether, which all I heard a lot of people who are genuinely suffering. But it does just raise
this issue that you and I are talking about. Well, I think this can be handled better, and much of it is exactly what you said, that there's a legal pathway that is not allowing it's not giving space for just ordinary acknowledgment, you know, just kind of letting someone feel heard, just acknowledging their distress of feeling wronged, and that could potentially save gazillions of dolls absolutely and improve all sorts of suffering.
I'm speaking as a layman here. I don't think that you're legally obligated to say to the employee, Okay, you were wronged. That's minefield, which is your terrain. But I think that again, the acknowledgment to the employee going you actually were wronged here, this person is going to apologize to you. We just want you to feel safe in your workplace.
That's exactly right, Phil. So there's room for new rituals here, new kind of workplace rituals, new kind of legal rituals that marry the mental health with the law, and I think is the ideal space of it. Consider what that might look like.