From covering medical treatment costs to paying for lost wages, workers’ compensation benefits are important for your employees. But do workers’ comp benefits cover stress, anxiety or other mental health-related claims? The answer is that it depends on the injury.
Stress, anxiety and other mental health-related claims are reviewed on a case-by-case basis. However, many states do often allow employees to collect workers’ compensation for stress-related injuries. For instance,
California and
Oregon often cover these claims.
To get coverage, your employee will need to prove that their job caused their anxiety or stress. They’ll also need to clearly distinguish how their stress came from work and not their outside life.
To receive workers’ compensation for stress and anxiety, an employee’s job must be the cause of their injury or illness. Mental health injuries that a workers’ comp policy may help cover include:
- Stress
- Depression
- Anxiety disorders
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Unlike a physical injury, mental illnesses can be more difficult to prove. Mental health injuries need to be severe enough to disrupt your employee’s ability to do their job. Some scenarios that may receive coverage include:
- A shooting in your business that leads to multiple employees filing claims for PTSD.
- Your employees filing workers’ compensation claims for anxiety after feeling harassed by an aggressive co-worker.
If you have an employee that’s so stressed out from their job that they can no longer function normally, they should document what they’re experiencing formally in a report. They’ll want to include the date, time, cause and description of the work injury. Once they do this, you can report their workplace injuries by filing a claim with your insurance company.
