Dr Tanveer Ahmed is a psychiatrist not a sociologist or social researcher – yet he knows what really motivates injured workers?
This comes from a psychiatrist – a profession renowned for drugging and medicalising everyone who walks through the door. There is ample research to show they are just as big a part of the problem as a lawyers. In fact, it wasn’t until I stopped seeing a psychiatrist along with bucket loads of anti-depressants that I started to feel human again. Money? what money? You have to be crippled and institutionalised to meet 15% whole person impairment. Reading this you’d think the old myth the so-called underclass of society were searching for easy money – Dr Ahmed needs to conduct some proper research before offering such an outdated and incorrect opinion.
According to Dr Ahmed:
The dramatic increases in compensation payments in the past decade or two, culminating in a deficit of about $4 billion, have largely been driven by massive increases in awards of claims surrounding so called ”stress leave” and ”nervous shock”, neither of which has any technical meaning in mental health practice.
Like all legal matters, what is legal truth often varies dramatically from what is accepted as medical or scientific truth.
In a public sector agency such as the police, NSW taxpayers have paid more than $100 million since 2005 to help fund a big rise in disability claims due to mental illness.
There has been a 300 per cent rise in such claims by police since 2005, exacerbated by a scheme that pays generous amounts to those claiming at younger ages.
The lawyers are often accomplices in a cycle preventing recovery. While it might come as a surprise to many readers that most lawyers are honourable, there is a minority who actively encourage disability and illness in their clients. Some lawyers actively discourage their clients from returning to work even when they are able – despite the sense of purpose and structure that work can bring and its critical role in a patient’s wellbeing – because returning to work will immediately impact on any compensation payout.
For this reason, many of my medical colleagues refuse to even see workers’ compensation clients because they feel the dice are loaded, that there is a host of systemic and psychological impediments to the patient’s recovery, like an unseen tug of war between good health and good money.
What might in the past have been defined as work angst, disappointment about a worker’s failed aspirations or garden-variety performance management, is now often considered workplace bullying or job-related trauma, which then gets transmitted through the lens of mental illness. The compensation path is an area where some spurned workers can feel a sense of resolution when the industrial process fails to give them one.
This is a worrying trend and might perpetuate, for these accident victims, lives of dependence and misery – and also cost them their self-esteem.
The trend occurs overwhelmingly in lower-paid jobs among relatively unskilled workers, many of whom cannot see any prospect of reinventing themselves in a fast-changing economy. The company collapses and job losses we are now seeing in sectors such as manufacturing and construction can only exacerbate this trend.
Along with a level of certainty about the future, studies have repeatedly shown that a sense of autonomy in work, regardless of the task, is critical for fulfilment.
It gives a sense of mastery over life, which when removed can be replaced by the experience of learnt helplessness, a psychological term for people who feel unable to control the events that shape their lives, like a raft flipped around on choppy waters.
Men, for whom the security of unionised labour in the manufacturing industries is slowly but surely becoming a distant memory, are experiencing a huge displacement from modern economic trends.
It’s been replaced by casualised, service-oriented work with relatively low wages.
In essence, their work has been feminised, a development exacerbated by the financial crisis.
Ever since we moved from extended families working on the land to wage slaves in factories or offices, we have relied on work for providing us with a larger share of our identity than before.
This is especially so today, in an era in which the ties that bind us to family and community are weak, leaving many of us more vulnerable to suffering any fissures that occur in the workplace as direct insults upon our sense of self.
Work can be a transcendent force, one whose presence gives us structure, security and a moral worth, even in the most sedentary, oppressive jobs. The alternative is always worse: no job, low self-esteem, fragile viability, no pay, no nothing.
Australia is a country uniquely placed for the successful application of organised labour. Mark Twain called us an entire nation of the working class. Our defining national events, such as the Eureka Stockade and Gallipoli, were, in part, predicated upon the underdog rising up against more powerful interests. But the lukewarm protests against workers’ compensation reforms, from nurses’ to firefighters’ unions, look like another chapter in the decline of unions as a centripetal national force.
There are some elements of the NSW government’s changes that have perhaps gone too far, such as the phasing out of payments after five years even when work is deemed to be the cause of serious injury.
Genuine, serious injuries do not suddenly disappear at midnight, five years later. The treatment bill remains.
But the reforms overall are a stinging rebuke to a fragile labour movement, for whom the decades-long loosening of mental health definitions will no longer be an ally.
Here’s what a former claims officer wrote in response to Dr Ahmed’s drivel – and of, course my response to said former claims officer:
I’m sorry but the article is spot on – I too worked as a claims officer and was staggered as to what got passed as work related pyschological injuries. The system just reinforces the opportunity for certain types of people to see this as their God given right for support. Most claims were started by innocuous events and compared to stresses that ordinary folk in non developed countries have to get on with they were mainly trifling. The manual used for diagnosis has grown in size by a factor of 5 or more yet we are still the same humans we ever were. NSW is very brave in combating the unions,solicitors and associated medicos who all get a nice feed from the system.
Commenter
David
I’m sorry, but claims officers are a large part of the problem – they doctor shop in order to reduce liabilities. This is a well known fact. Keep shopping until you get the response you want – that’s why insurers have preferred specialists who usually make a very fine living working for insurers.
Yes, and we all know claims officers are glorified clerks with no medical expertise.
Commenter
John McPhilbin
Bravo for CJ who writes:
Usually, Tanveer Ahmed’s columns are spot on. Not this time.
For the sake of weeding out the (no doubt) small minority of dubious workers compensation claims, he is willing to see financial devastion and hardship inflicted on the vast majority of people injured either physically or mentally in the workplace.
And surely. if there were dubious mental illness claims under the old system there is only one reason: Dr Ahmed and his colleagues. Without doctors signing off on these claims, they could not be made.
As for the simplistic suggestion that any type of menial, soul destroying work is better than none at all, Dr Ahmed should acqaunt himself better with the latest literature.
There is growing evidence to suggest people doing menial jobs for poverty level incomes, who have little control over their employment or working lives suffer major and detrimental psychological impacts.
The O’Farrell Government’s changes to workers compensation are indefensible and contemptuous of all working people. They should be condemned, not defended.
Dr Ahmed makes his argument from the enviable position of a specialist doctor earning circa $300 an hour.
Most people are not so lucky. Should they become injured at work, they are in serious financial trouble now, with little protection in place.
I wonder how many psychiatrists make a really good living off this system? An expert report to the recent [Worker Compensation Inquiry] committee that investigated excessive costs to the scheme said the real costs lay in insurance companies saying ‘no’ to claims from the start, and their hostile claims management system sending people to doctor after doctor,’.
This so-called doctor is little more than a media whore.
Look at his latest tweet about his own SMH article:
Is Australia a nation of cashed up bogans- and what it has to with workers comp. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politi …
https://twitter.com/drtahmed/status/218291175952617472
So, he’s inferring that claimants are cashed up bogans claiming workers compensation, framing it as a question so he can say “I never claimed that”. The man is disgisting.
I saw on WorkCoverWatch https://twitter.com/WorkCoverWatch/status/218279922593042432 that he’s actually a Liberal party stooge.
Any wonder his article is so biased and his tweets so insensitive. He ought to be reported to the NSW Medical Board for his despicable conduct.
Dr Tanveer Ahmed has a track record of supporting most issues from an economic rationalist viewpoint. His agenda is ideologically driven and he is not really a credible source for political issues like this one. He should stick to his area of expertise – psychiatry and refrain from involvement in the political arena as this creates a conflict between the hypocratic oath he has taken as a doctor and the monetary gain he acquires supporting policies which enrich certain sections of society.
Seems like many psychiatrists are up in arms about this guy and his opinions. I’ve been assured his opinion is not representative of the profession. An embarrassment really.
This guy may just be part of this lot:
The bully workers compensation psychiatrists who shrink the workcover claims
Isn’t it great when we actually get to see the standard of so called professionals we have to deal with. I think Dr Ahmed has revealed his true colours and lack of understanding of the whole situation. Maybe he could spend a couple of nights on the streets talking to homeless who are there as a result of their lucrative payouts from their compensation claim, or visit the morgue and review some suicides who are there as a result of their claims.
What about employers duty of care, I know of one case where an employee was forced back to work by this type of attitude only to have a complete breakdown and stabbed a fellow worker.
As far as him singling out emergency workers, if he was exposed to the blood, gore and misery that they see, almost an a daily basis, he would have a different view. Why don’t professionals working as IME’s have to do some practical research before they are registered. Doctors could visit so called rehabilitated patients see how they live, the impacts on family. The changes to one’s whole family a wheelchair can make, the stress on loved ones every day wondering if they are going to come home to the suicide of a Workcover victim with their lucrative payout.
Dr Ahmed, how about climbing out of your ignorance, and your office for that matter, and talking to a few victims that can’t afford your services, or spend some with the counsellors that help these people every day.
I’m not a nasty person by nature but reading things like this is really starting to get to me and is slowly changing my nature because all I could think is “well I hope you have to go through the workers comp system as a patient and not a Doctor”. I hate all these people who judge injured workers, they have no right. I have always tried to show empathy towards all people and not judge others so I find it hard to understand how some people can judge others so harshly. I feel so angry, it seems the changes to Workcover have bought out the worst in some people( maybe they are always like it, who knows), the opinionated wankers should all go and f*#%* off.
Check out this media article:
The government also claims the payouts are a disincentive for injured employees to return to work.
INJURED workers face heavy cuts to their benefits after a parliamentary inquiry suggested a major overhaul of the state’s current workers’ compensation scheme.
The Joint Select Committee on the NSW Workers Compensation Scheme made 28 recommendations including the dumping of “journey” claims, meaning workers will no longer be covered for injuries sustained while travelling to and from their place of employment.
The report also suggested capping medical payments, impose a five-year limit on payouts for less seriously injured workers and removing compensation for families who suffer nervous shock when a relative is in a workplace accident.
About 5000 public sector employees rallied outside NSW Parliament last week, condemning the proposals.
But Premier Barry O’Farrell said mismanagement of the funds had resulted in a $4 billion debt for the state.
The government also claims the payouts are a disincentive for injured employees to return to work.
A joint standing committee is expected to undertake a detailed review of the scheme.
http://mt-druitt-standard.whereilive.com.au/news/story/workers-face-heavy-cuts-in-compensation/
Being nice gets you no where in life it seems, if your a wanker you get to be on top! If your nice you get walked over.
I’d give anything to have my arm back and my life as I once knew it and work my 60 hours a week, I LOVED my job, I really really did and miss it so so much. How can workcover “pay” be a “disincentive” for returning to work? Could you live of K28 per year? Right… me neither, boofheads!
We live in utter poverty, get our medical and like treatments/services cut off, denied or delayed, every bloody month something else in under “review” by the “uneducated clerk”…As far as I am concerned, most injured workers are DESPERATE a) to return to work as fast as possible and b) to get off this ponzi scheme (and never ever get back on it).
What a joke.
I sincerely believe that our policy and legislation makers, case managers, insurers etc all ought to either suffer a terrible workplace injury and be on the real system themselves, or that it is compulsory that they spent each at least 14 days in the life of an injured worker – including attending humiliating IMEs (and reading the subsequent reports), attending conciliation, reading and answering case manager “review” and other “letters”, being stalked by PIs, harassed by rehab, called by debt collector, etc etc.