Recent data reveals that the most common injuries sustained in workplace settings are not physical but mental.
The 2023 Atticus survey shows that mental health issues top the chart for the most common type of workplace injury, beating sprains, fractures, burns, trips, concussions, and respiratory issues.
Atticus is a company that assists individuals in crisis, helping them get help from publicly available services and insurance companies. To gather data on workplace injuries, they collected non-fatal injury data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, fatal and catastrophic injury data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, surveyed 1,000 workers, and reviewed search volume data from Google Trends.
The firm found that 52% of reported injuries sustained while on the job were related to issues such as stress and anxiety.
“It makes people think about mental health differently, that you could consider a mental health issue, maybe an injury,” said workplace expert Dan Schawbel, speaking with Yahoo! Finance.
Mental health concerns can translate into a higher risk of accidents, according to Graham Cowan, a certified health, safety, and environment consultant. Cowan asserts that individuals struggling with being overworked, stressed, and overly fatigued have a higher likelihood of making mistakes, having an accident, and sustaining injuries.
Some 10% of workers reportedly experience mental health issues related to their jobs, per the survey.
Employers have a “duty of care” to ensure their employees’ safety and well-being, which includes addressing mental health concerns, according to Cowan.
Encouraging a healthy work-life balance, fostering a supportive workplace culture where employees feel appreciated and supported, and providing mental health support such as therapy are some ways in which companies can help.
With an estimated 1 in 4 adult Americans suffering with a diagnosable mental disorder, per Johns Hopkins Medicine, the issue is very relevant.
“I think what’s happening is we’re reaching this inflection point with mental health,” said Dr. Emily Anhalt, a psychoanalytic psychologist and co-founder of Coa, a company striving to improve emotional fitness through therapist-led learning experiences, per Yahoo! Finance.
“… [E]veryone is starting to understand that it costs more for our culture and society to fix mental health problems than it would to prevent them and to help people having better mental health in a proactive way,” Anhalt concluded.
