Psychological safety is not only about preventing harm;
it is also about preventing exclusion.
26–27 May 2022
By the end of May 2022, I was no longer simply trying to recover from a workplace injury. I was trying to stop my entire life from collapsing.
It had become a fight to protect everything I had spent my adult life building.
My health.
My career.
My family’s wellbeing.
My home.
And perhaps most painfully, my belief that if you asked for help in good faith, someone with the authority to intervene eventually would.
Instead, every door I knocked on seemed to close.
Nearly two years had passed since I had lodged my workers’ compensation claim. I still wasn’t receiving the weekly payments that were supposed to support my recovery. The Injury Management Plan that had set out a pathway back to my job had never been implemented. Instead, I was watching my savings disappear, my health deteriorate, and the possibility of losing my home become terrifyingly real.
What these documents capture is someone who had reached the point where asking for the law to be followed felt like an impossible request.
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During those two days, I found myself writing some of the most desperate correspondence I have ever written.
I was writing because I genuinely believed I was running out of time.
After nearly two years of trying to engage every part of the system, I was now facing the possibility of losing my home because my workers’ compensation benefits had never been properly implemented, despite an Injury Management Plan that contemplated my recovery and return to my pre-injury role.
The practical consequences were becoming impossible to ignore.
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When policy becomes personal
Around this time I was trying to settle on a home.
The bank’s lending requirements were straightforward.
If I had been receiving the weekly workers’ compensation payments that should have accompanied my accepted return-to-work arrangements, the income verification process would have been relatively uncomplicated.
Instead, I was trying to explain why the income that should have existed did not.
The irony was overwhelming.
One document setting out the bank’s requirements sat alongside my handwritten reflections:
“Had employer and insurer not committed… and actually complied with workers’ compensation regulations, I would have had a home loan approved…”
This wasn’t simply about one property transaction. It represented something much larger.
When statutory obligations are not enforced, the consequences don’t remain inside a legal file.
They spill into every part of a person’s life.
- Housing.
- Financial security.
- Retirement.
- Health.
- Family.
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Watching political promises while living the opposite reality
What made those days particularly difficult was what I was seeing publicly.
Political leaders were visiting the University, celebrating nurses, teachers and frontline workers, speaking about better workplaces, fair conditions and safer environments. Screenshots of those public posts became part of my records.
See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-social-media-post-i-saw-on-29-april.html
One message particularly stayed with me.
After attending a workplace memorial service, the statement concluded:
“We all need to do more. And we need to do better.”
See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-day-i-almost-didnt-come-back.html
Those are words almost everyone would agree with.
But I remember sitting there wondering:
Where was “doing better” for workers already being harmed?
Where was “doing more” when someone was asking for enforcement of existing workplace safety and workers’ compensation laws?
I wasn’t asking anyone to invent new protections.
I was asking them to ensure the protections that already existed were actually applied.
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Silence became its own kind of injury
What hurts most about those emails is the loneliness.
I had spent two decades helping students, researchers, academics and colleagues.
Service had never felt transactional to me.
You help people because that’s what good workplaces do.
Yet when I needed support, the silence became deafening.
In one email I wrote:
“I need support and kindness and compassion. I’m a human being. Please make it stop.”
Those words are just someone asking to be treated as a human being.
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Fighting on multiple fronts
At the same time I was preparing material for my workers’ compensation solicitor.
I was also delivering information concerning Fair Work issues to my local federal representative.
From my perspective, there were parallel systems that should each have been addressing different aspects of what had happened.
One related to workplace rights.
The other related to workers’ compensation obligations.
Neither could be viewed in isolation.
My return to work depended upon both.
That was why I kept describing the Enterprise Agreement and the Injury Management Plan together.
One governed my employment relationship.
The other governed my recovery.
Neither was being honoured.
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The home became symbolic
As the financial pressure intensified, my home stopped representing bricks and mortar.
It became a symbol of everything that was being lost.
My parents had sacrificed enormously to give me opportunities they never had.
- Education.
- Three university degrees.
- A professional career.
- Financial independence.
The possibility that all of that could disappear because statutory obligations were not being enforced felt almost impossible to comprehend.
That fear appears throughout these documents.
Not as a legal argument.
As a human one.
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Reading these documents today
Reading these emails now, I can hear someone whose nervous system had been pushed far beyond its limits.
Someone trying every available avenue simultaneously because no single avenue appeared to be working.
Someone who still believed that if the right person finally understood what was happening, they would step in.
Today I understand much more about trauma than I did then.
I know prolonged uncertainty changes how people think.
I know financial insecurity compounds psychological injury.
I know institutional silence can become another source of harm.
But I also know something else.
These documents matter because they capture what prolonged systemic failure actually looks like from the inside.
Not years later.
Not reconstructed with hindsight.
But in real time.
And that is why I continue telling this story.
Behind every workers’ compensation file is a human being trying to hold together a life that, piece by piece, is being pulled apart by the systems that exist to have protected those human beings.
That’s systemic abuse.
And the wage theft continues to this day…
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 346-347, 350.
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Further Reading
The loneliness and social isolation described throughout this chronology were the result of workplace conduct that I’m experiencing as deliberate ostracism and exclusion during my workers’ compensation claim, at a time when the legislation and my Injury Management Plan contemplated recovery at work, ongoing support, and a return to my pre-injury role.
I now recognise this pattern as something that has been described in occupational health literature as workplace ostracism and, when sustained and involving coordinated exclusion, workplace mobbing. These are not simply interpersonal conflicts. They are recognised as psychosocial hazards because they undermine a person’s psychological safety, sense of belonging and capacity to recover from workplace harm.
What makes this particularly difficult to understand is that recovery from a psychological workplace injury is generally intended to be supported through safe work, appropriate communication and maintaining connection with the workplace. Yet, as described throughout this chronology, my experience was the opposite. Rather than being supported to remain connected to my colleagues and workplace during recovery, I experienced increasing exclusion and isolation. It’s that contrast that makes the consequences of workplace ostracism so significant.
A 2024 editorial published in Nature Mental Health, The Hurt of Loneliness and Social Isolation, explains why this matters. It describes loneliness and social isolation as major public health issues associated with serious physical and mental health consequences, including increased risks of cardiovascular disease, depression, cognitive decline and premature mortality. The editorial also discusses evidence that prolonged loneliness can alter stress responses, immune function and inflammation, illustrating that social isolation is not merely an emotional experience but one with measurable biological consequences.
For me, this research provides an important context for understanding the human cost of prolonged workplace exclusion. Recovery from a psychological workplace injury depends not only on clinical treatment, but also on safe systems of work, meaningful social connection and compliance with the employer’s statutory obligations. When those safeguards fail—or, as in my case, are replaced by deliberate exclusion—the consequences can extend far beyond the workplace.
Whether described as workplace ostracism, social isolation, or workplace mobbing, the effect is profound. Instead of being supported to recover, I’m still experiencing increased disconnection from my colleagues, my workplace and, over time, much of my wider support network. As the regulatory “processes” continue without resolution, that isolation has become prolonged, and it’s placing me at risk, both psychologically and physically.
Therefore, I repeat what I’ve said for years, in an Australian society that’s become increasingly and disturbingly indifferent: this systemic abuse must stop!
Including and predominately from SIRA NSW and SafeWork NSW!
Reference
The hurt of loneliness and social isolation. (2024). Nature Mental Health. 2. 255–256. [Open access]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00221-5
