Injured Workers at Increased Risk of Suicide

The attached article (click here) should get everyone’s attention.   Suffering a serious job injury is bad enough, but then you have to figure in the financial worries (try surviving long on 2/3rds of you wages while having to pay 100% of your bills), fear of loosing your job once you recover, having to fight for your medical care, being forced to return to work long before you have recovered from your injury and more and more often being denied pain medication.

A serious job injury often results in depression, anxiety or other mental problems.

Part of your rights under Alabama’s Worker’ Compensation Law includes your medical treatment, and that includes treatment for psychological problems sustained as the result of a workplace injury; however, getting mental health care in a workers’ comp case generally takes a long fight-trust me, we’ve fought this fight many times. Comp hardly ever goes ahead and schedules an injured worker for mental health care unless they are forced to do so.  Honestly, many times injured workers are made to feel like they are doing something wrong.  Suffering a Job Injury is not against the law-and injured workers’ should not be made to feel like it is one.

In Alabama, in order for a psychological problem or mental disorder to be covered under workers’ compensation, the worker must have sustained a physical injury. The physical injury does not have to be a serious injury, as long as the physical injury suffered in the workplace injury caused the mental problem or accelerated or triggered an underlying mental condition. Hence, any mental impairment causally related to the injury you sustained when you were hurt at work is to be covered by workers’ compensation. This includes any underlying mental disorders the worker may have had prior to being hurt at work as long as the job injury makes the mental problem worse. This includes depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder or the worsening of a condition of paranoia, schizophrenia or other underlying mental problem.

If you work in Alabama and suffered a workplace injury and you now suffer with the side effects of depression, anxiety or if an underlying psychological problem was made worse after being hurt at work, you are entitled to treatment for said psychological injury. If you were hurt at work and now suffer from the side effects of a psychological problem, the experienced Alabama Workman’s Compensation lawyers at Powell and Denny would be happy to talk with you about your rights.

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