Grinberg: American Psychiatric Association Notes Work-From-Home Psych Effects

Friday, December 17, 2021 | 0

In school, did you learn about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871? 

Gregory Grinberg

As legend has it, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocked over a lantern, starting a fire that spread throughout most of the city. The damage was devastating, including loss of life and property damage, but the aftermath was astounding as well. Chicago, founded roughly 100 years prior to the fire, is now rebuilt as one of the more modern cities in the world.

Fast-forward to today. In March of 2020, we all went into lockdown, and suddenly a large section of the labor force was working remotely — not as an exception, a gimmick or an accommodation, but as the norm. Almost two years later, many of California’s tech firms that once attracted labor with promises of catered lunches, massages and celebrity appearances at the employer’s campus are now considering whether those offers are still competitive against offers to work remote permanently.

In a lot of ways, remote working is fantastic. Time spent commuting can now be spent for other purposes, work can be done in comfort, safe from the illnesses that rampage through crowded workplaces, and, as Californians can appreciate more than most people in the country, an opportunity to live somewhere with a lower price tag. 

But, this far out from our black swan event, we are seeing more and more consequences of shifting from being at work with other people every day to being at home with a computer screen all the time. According to this article, an American Psychiatric Association study of 1,000 people shows a majority reporting isolation, loneliness and other mental health impacts as a result of working from home.

Forgive me, dear readers, but I can’t resist the urge for a shameless plug for a presentation about defending injuries allegedly sustained while working from home.  Let me know if you’d like a presentation in your office on this subject. Each presentation comes with free dad jokes.

The sample size is small and self-reported, so let’s not assume that this is an epidemic within a pandemic, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that working from home is going to change the landscape of the workers’ compensation industry. 

Logic dictates that office jobs tend to be a bit less extreme than non-office jobs. Your typical injuries will be strains, sprains, carpal tunnel, perhaps some psych. Of course, there is the occasional workplace violence, but the more physically arduous jobs — those that cannot be done remotely — will yield more frequent and significant injuries. 

But now that the novelty of working from home has long worn off, I think we can expect to see an uptick in injuries that will result from such a setup: poor ergonomic work stations and the psychological effects both of limited social interaction that naturally occurs at work, for better or for worse, and even those effects from the lack of bodily movement that comes with preparing for and enduring the commute. Recall that the AMA recognized obesity as a disease all the way back in 2013.  

What about the psychological effects of erosion of the boundaries between “work” and “off work?” What is the psychological effect of being “always on” for calls, emails, Zoom meetings, etc.? From personal experience, always being prompt to respond to work e-mails and phone calls, regardless the hour, I can attest that it certainly is not for everyone. Lawyers, to some extent, are trained to do this and expect it as part of the job, but many traditional fields did not have such an understanding.

Chalk this up as just more fallout from the new normal.

Gregory Grinberg is managing partner of Gale, Sutow & Associates’ S.F. Bay South office and a certified specialist in workers’ compensation law. This post is reprinted with permission from Grinberg’s WCDefenseCA blog.