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Antiwork

Difficult to get compensations for mental health issues triggered at work with disability insurance

I recently took some time off due to mental health issues, which were triggered by both personal life (heartbroken breakup) and toxic work environments (long working hours for months and intolerable office politics). I filed the claim for short-term disability trying to get some compensations. Otherwise, I would lose income when I am on leave.. Also, therapy costs and living expense are extremely expensive in NYC, and I really need the compensations to cover part of them. However, I just got a call from my disability insurance company, and according to them it is very possible that my claim would be denied since in the medical records provided by my therapist, my mental health issues were work-related, so it won't get covered…. So they suggested me to apply for the worker compensations instead. However, based on what I read online, it is almost impossible to get paid through the worker…


I recently took some time off due to mental health issues, which were triggered by both personal life (heartbroken breakup) and toxic work environments (long working hours for months and intolerable office politics). I filed the claim for short-term disability trying to get some compensations. Otherwise, I would lose income when I am on leave.. Also, therapy costs and living expense are extremely expensive in NYC, and I really need the compensations to cover part of them.

However, I just got a call from my disability insurance company, and according to them it is very possible that my claim would be denied since in the medical records provided by my therapist, my mental health issues were work-related, so it won't get covered…. So they suggested me to apply for the worker compensations instead. However, based on what I read online, it is almost impossible to get paid through the worker compensations for mental health issues, and also you need to prove that your mental health issues were solely triggered by the work, which means if you have other triggers like my situation (i.e., breakup), it will also invalidate the application…

Honestly, I actually decided to give up on getting the compensations for this medical leave (though it means I will lose 10k+ USD) I already got so so so tired and exhausted during this claim application process. Just imagined when you were already very very depressed and anxious, struggling every day to take care of yourself and get better, at the same time you still need to deal with a lot of paperworks/deadlines required by the insurance company, write essays to insurance company to describe your daily “depressed and anxious” activities to show your eligibility, and deal with random calls from the insurance who have a lot of a lot of question about your depression and anxiety. Let alone, there is still financial pressure coming from expensive therapy costs (>$800 per month), the loss of income, inflation and high living expense.

Therefore, I feel that going forward it might be more wise for me to stop spending time on this and reallocate my time to other things, and I don't think it is easy to find an affordable and reliable attorney to take care of this.

Anyway, after going through this whole process, I did realize how vulnerable a worker could be in this kind of situations….I feel that I am already kind of lucky since I have enough savings and do not have any debts. But I could not imagine how worse this situation could be for the less fortunate workers. I did not really see any ways out of this. This is really a “system” issue. The whole healthcare and labor protection system is broken…. This is so sad…. Sigh*

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