When Distress Is Put in Writing - March 2021 - Part 1

“Psychological safety at its core is about permission for candor.” – Amy C. Edmondson

There are moments when distress is no longer something experienced privately — it becomes something that must be documented, explained, and defended.

This is one of those moments.

On 14 March 2021, I documented my distress because the systems responsible for protecting me had failed to do so. I was not writing for attention or advocacy. I was writing because I was experiencing escalating psychological harm and no longer felt safe engaging without clear boundaries.

“I’m distressed, traumatised and living with fear.”

Those words were written in the early hours of the morning, at a time when sleep was impossible and fear had become constant. They were not rhetorical. They were factual.

At that point, I had already raised serious concerns through formal channels. I was requesting — explicitly and in writing — that contact cease from certain parties and that my treating practitioners not be approached without consent. These were safety requests, not strategic ones.

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Fear Is Not Irrational When Harm Is Ongoing

Distress is often dismissed as emotional or subjective. But distress becomes objectively relevant when it arises in response to ongoing conduct, power imbalance, and the absence of effective safeguards.

In my correspondence, I described repeated contact that I experienced as intimidating and destabilising. I asked that it stop.

“I demand no contact… I’m suffering worse trauma and injury now.”

This was not an accusation. It was a boundary.

It is important to understand what this represents: when a person is forced to assert boundaries in writing, repeatedly, it is usually because earlier verbal and procedural safeguards have failed.

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When Medical Forms Become Evidence

Shortly after, I was required to complete medico-legal telehealth documentation. These forms are designed to capture clinical information. In my case, they also became a contemporaneous record of harm.

I documented symptoms including:

• heart palpitations

• shaking

• avoidance of email communication

• elevated blood pressure

• trauma-related distress

These symptoms were not abstract. They were described in direct connection with ongoing workplace and system interactions.

“Avoiding triggers eg emails due to HR harassment…”

This is not emotive language. It is clinical language, recorded for medical purposes.

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Consent, Privacy, and Written Boundaries

On the informed consent documentation, I made clear handwritten annotations:

“Do not provide my information to staff at my employer.”

These statements exist because consent had previously not been respected. They reflect an attempt to regain control over personal medical information in circumstances where trust had already been eroded.

When someone must assert consent this explicitly, it indicates a system failure — not an overreaction.

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When Life Contracts Under Systemic Pressure

By the time I completed the section on daily activities, the impact had spread well beyond work.

“My days are consumed by reporting negligence of insurer and employer…”

This sentence captures something rarely acknowledged: the invisible labour injured people perform when systems fail to operate as designed.

Distress does not arise in isolation. It is often the cumulative result of silence, delay, deflection, and the absence of protective intervention.

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This Is What Silence Produces

This record does not show instability. It shows distress under sustained pressure.

It shows what happens when:

• communication breaks down

• safeguards are not activated

• consent is not respected

• and the injured person is left to manage risk alone

Distress, when ignored, does not resolve. It deepens. It embeds. It becomes injury.

I am sharing this because the record matters — and because no one should have to prove their suffering this way simply to be safe. 

Source: contemporaneous record of events, 14 - 22 March 2021 - Document 161

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Further reading - the regulators should be regulating the insurers

Han, B. (n.d.). ‘Be Afraid’. Insurance News. [Online]: https://in-magazine.com.au/be-afraid/