PTSD and Workers Compensation: What should You Do to Move Forward?
Mental health injuries are among the most complicated personal injury cases due to their complexities.
Quick Fact
An estimated 3.6 percent of adults suffered from PTSD last year alone.
When injured in a workplace accident, you need to take care of your physical injuries and mental trauma. Normally, your employer and fellow workers assume that you have entirely healed from the physical injuries, and you can get back to work without any delay.
However, most of them fail to notice that every severe injury comes with some form of mental trauma that might not heal at the same rate as a laceration or a fracture.
Quick Fact
Normally, PTSD takes between six and twelve weeks to heal. This can take longer depending on the circumstances.
In fact, it takes months for mental trauma to heal, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
How Does PTSD Develop after a Workplace Injury?
This condition develops following a serious workplace accident that was too traumatic. Your brain just refuses to let the incident go, leading to prolonged anxiety, depression, stress, and fear that keeps reminding you of the initial incident. This is known as PTSD.
Diagnosing PTSD isn’t a cut and dried case as diagnosing someone with a bruise. You can’t just take an x-ray and determine that the person has the condition. The medical practitioner uses the symptoms the person manifests to help diagnose the condition.
Some of the symptoms include avoidance, depression, and anxiety.
So, how do you deal with the condition?
Give Yourself Time
This condition affects people differently. The symptoms you manifest aren’t the same symptoms someone else will show. You might retreat from the world or become defensive, while another person might go into depression.
This is why you need to slow down and give yourself time to process the incident. Once you acknowledge it, you can now get a way forward on how to treat it.
Many people who suffer from this condition feel as if everyone is against them and no one understands them at all. If you feel helpless, you need to reach out for professional help.
Ask for Help from Experts
Many people suffering from this condition tend to isolate themselves from what they enjoyed before the incident happened.
One of the biggest steps to recovery is reaching out to family and friends that can understand the event and are willing to help. You can also reach out to a lawyer for worker’s comp to help you make things clear about what happened and what you are going through. They can also point you in the right direction regarding the support you need.
Reduce Stress
Filing a worker’s compensation claim after a workplace injury can be a long and stressful process, making PTSD worse.
While lawyers aren’t the right professional to help you reduce the effects of the condition, they can help you reduce the stress of filing for and handling workers’ comp claims.
With help from the right lawyer for worker’s comp, you can reduce the hassle of handling the claim by yourself. The main objective when suffering from this condition is to lower stress to the minimum level. This is possible if you seek both medical and legal help. A balance of the two is ideal.
Work With A Lawyer For Worker’s Comp
Those suffering from this condition are usually unable to resume work fully due to the physical and mental symptoms associated with it. Even if you get back to work, you require months of regular treatment to heal.
The condition can be a standalone claim, or it can arise from a physical injury sustained on the job. You might recover from the physical injuries but suffer from the mental condition for years to come.
Working with a competent lawyer, you can claim compensation for the physical injuries and the PTSD. To understand where you stand in matters asking for compensation, consult a skilled personal injury lawyer to help you file a claim and explore the various legal options available to you.
Call us today to start the path towards recovery and get compensated for the costs you incur treating the PTSD.
