Mental Injury Claims

The topic of workers’ compensation is a highly discussed and controversial topic. Within that framework, there are three types of mental injury claims that are currently recognized: physical trauma causing mental injury, mental stimulus causing physical injury, and mental stimulus causing mental injury. The latter of the three is recognized as the most controversial, as many courts did not compensate for this type of injury, as there is no physical evidence. While many courts now compensate for that type of injury, they imposed limitations on the recovery of a mental-mental illness. Reading this information elicited several reactions. First, it seemed to be demonstrate that mental illness is not completely accepted and/or understood from a legal perspective. The feeling I got while reading this, which was later stated in the book, was that there is a significant amount of skepticism about mental injury, mental injury claims, and mental illness in general. I believe that perspectives on this issue are different, depending on culture and geographic location within in the U.S., but it still seems like a majority of people maintain skepticism about it.

Second, as I perceived feelings of skepticism, I thought about why it exists.

I hypothesized that because graduate students are frequently taught to be highly accepting and considerate of other individuals, they engage in this practice to such a degree that it may be perceived as a weakness and decreases psychologists’ credibility in some forensic settings. I do not have any professional experience interacting with and/or working with individuals in a forensic setting, and I realize this is a very general statement and is not the case for everyone, but it was part of my initial reaction while completing this

reading.
While it seems that many people appear to question mental injury, I believe is important to consider the other side of the spectrum, and understand there are exceptions to every rule. Likewise, there are almost positively individuals who either abuse or attempt to abuse this system. Therefore, it is important to have rules and regulations in place that make it difficult for individuals to exploit the system, as workers’ compensation can be very expensive. Despite those individuals, it appears that courts are still somewhat dependent on tangible or physical evidence that indicates an individual qualifies for compensation. As such, this practice makes it seemingly more difficult for individuals to obtain compensation, as well as maintains skepticism about mental illness and mental injury in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Relatedly, the article highlighted that, prior to its conception, there were no published documents that focused on symptom and performance validity. Seeing that the article was written in 2014, I felt surprised because this seems like one of the most important aspects to evaluate in a psychological injury case. It did not make sense to me that the validity of symptoms and performance on psychological measures was not at the forefront of forensic research.
This notion was even more surprising to me after inferring and reading about the skepticism associated with mental injury claims. If skepticism exists, I believe that researching sound validity measures is a legitimate method to address that skepticism. Now, as the authors outlined, there are an extensive amount of validity measures embedded within the mental injury evaluations, but if the skepticism still exists is this enough?
In my opinion, it makes sense to extensively research these instruments in the context of psychological injury. Assuming the validity measures outline in this article are psychometrically sound for this type of evaluation, then continually presenting that evidence may reduce the skepticism and stigma associated with mental injury.