Posted By Chris Abbott Not sure if this helps much Hard one to call.. Is an occupation illness an accident? From the HSE Website......... "Evidence suggests that stress is the lead cause of occupational ill health in local authority managed sectors of employment such as education and social services. Following a successful pilot last year, HSE and EMAS (our medical branch) are embarking on a national programme of assessing local authorities for their management of stress and rehabilitation of employees affected by stress."

Posted By Nigel Hammond An Occ Health Adviser told me that GP's are not supposed to sign people of with 'stress' because it is not a medical diagnosis. I gather they are supposed to be specific - such as 'depression' or 'anxiety'.

Posted By Philosophical Stress is neither an illness or disease classified under the ICD codes, therefore the individual's GP is doing the usual cop out. Stress may be the cause of a range of symptoms that could individually be classified as an illness under the ICD codes. Therefore you have two choices, don't pay the employee because under the diagnosis given there is no need, or challenge the doctor to lay down the correct diagnosis! Hope it helps.

Posted By Kieran Duignan This discussion illustrates why the HSE has taken so long to published management standards on occupational stress (and waited till research generated statistical data until they did so). The root problem is that there is no consensus about the variety of sources of stress; to recommend the ICD as proposed by 'Philosophical' simply adds to the confusion, as its status is as open to challenge as the psychiatric taxonomy it replaced (the DSM). From the basis of HASAWA, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 advocate that you assess risks of stress. You can use the HSE's draft management standards for occupational stress (on www.hse.gov.uk) as a framework for doing this, or the framework of Positive Psychology advocated by leading experts in clinical stress at the University of Pennsylvania as an alternative to the ICD and its alternative the DSM. You would then be in a position to ask a g.p. for clarification of his/her assessment on the basis of categories of stress of your choice; while he/she can reasonably deflect a challenge based on the questionable ICD framework, he/she has much less grounds for doing so if you ask in plain English about categories of stress that you actually understand.