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Mental health issues prominent among injured workers
Mental health issues prominent among injured workers
Mental
health issues prominent among injured workers
Brantford group gives
injured workers a voice
Injured Workers Group
Colleen
Toms
Brantford
Injured Workers Group founder Kim Prince speaks at Thursday's community meeting
as Trent University Professor Fergal O'Hagan looks on.
Brant
News
By Colleen Toms
There are
times when Wes Mahoney feels invisible.
Mahoney
is an injured worker and after years of being employed as a highrise window
cleaner and providing for his family, he now relies on the food bank to help
put meals on the table.
Mahoney
shattered his foot after falling three storeys while on the job and underwent
four orthopedic surgeries.
Ongoing
disputes with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) for compensation
and constant pain have left Mahoney depressed and anxious. His friends don’t
visit anymore, he is constantly criticized for not working and he often sits
home alone, in isolation, trying to come to grips with what has become of his
life.
“You’re
always in pain so nobody wants to be around you,” Mahoney said. “It’s like you
just lose contact with everybody and all of a sudden your anxiety goes through
the roof when you are around a crowd of people.
“It’s the
first time ever in my life that I had to go on welfare. It was like a kick in
the teeth. I always took pride that I had never been out of work.”
Trent
University professor Fergal O’Hagan told people attending a Brantford Injured
Workers’ Group community meeting last Thursday that Mahoney is not alone in his
despair.
Presenting
findings of a 2008 phone survey conducted with 494 injured workers, O’Hagan
said that there was a clear relationship between the stigma injured workers
face and mental health problems.
“The data
suggests that mental health problems are very prevalent in injured workers,”
O’Hagan said. “Upwards of one-quarter of injured workers can have high
depressive symptoms at six months (of being injured.)”
The
problem, he added, is that many go undiagnosed and as mental health symptoms
worsen, it often impacts the family unit as a whole.
“If you
have a mental health problem and it’s not identified, then there is no way that
you can get help through the system,” O’Hagan said. “The formal diagnosis is an
important recognition that is a gateway to supports.”
Stigma is
very common among injured workers and can help lead to mental health issues.
“Within
compensation systems people feel alienated, there’s a sense of fear, of benefit
cuts, that impose a different demand on injured workers than would occur just
in the population of people hurt otherwise,” O’Hagan said. “The adversarial
nature of the system contributes to that.
“Injured
workers commonly experience the feeling of being set apart from other people in
society.”
Mahoney’s
wife Kim Prince has been lobbying on behalf of her husband and all injured
workers in Brant. She was instrumental in forming the Brantford Injured
Workers’ Group to help people access the resources they need and give them a
voice.
“It’s for
peer support, for education and just for allowing other injured workers to find
out, ‘Hey, WSIB isn’t just doing this to me, they’re doing this to other
people.’ To understand that the poverty that injured workers’ land in, it’s not
their fault,” Prince said.
“(The
group is) about coming together and supporting each other and then educating
people so that they know how to fight the system, because it’s something we
were never taught. We always believe that WSIB is there as a safety net and
then when you need it, that net isn’t so safe.”
The
Ontario Network of Injured Workers’ Groups, Injured Workers Consultants and the
IAVGO Community Legal Clinic supported the community meeting. For more
information, connect with the Brantford Injured Workers’ Group on Facebook,
online at injuredworkersonline.org or email injuredworker.family.brantford@gmail.com.
Colleen
Toms is a general assignment reporter who covers arts, life and news for Brant
News. She can be reached at ctoms@brantnews.com.
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