Avoidance and work participation
Workplace phobia is not only defined by a special conglomerate
or quality of anxiety symptoms, but by work-related
participation disorders resulting from workplace phobic
avoidance behaviour. Avoidance is an important diagnostic
criterion (DSM-IV, Specific Phobia) of phobic anxiety disorders
and functions as a classical coping strategy in those
patients. In terms of learning theory, avoidance means negative
reinforcement (Skinner, 1969) and reduces anxiety for a
certain time.
Avoidance within the context of workplace phobia is often
to be seen in long-time sick leave, it may end in quitting the
workplace or early retirement. Therefore avoidance gets a
specific significance as it has in a special way negative effects
for the person’s further professional course. This is not true
for most other specific phobias (Greenberg et al., 1999).
The direct association of workplace phobia with work participation
disorders, which can be described with the sick
leave duration and work ability status as objective criteria,
can be seen as a specific characteristic of workplace phobia.
Empirical findings (Muschalla, 2008) show that the longer
the sick leave duration, the higher is the probability to suffer
from workplace phobia. Patients with conventional anxiety
disorders only were not associated with sick leave in the
same way as workplace phobics. This can be explained due
Table 1. Suggestion for diagnostic criteria of Workplace
Phobia, adopted and modified from the diagnostic
criteria of Specific Phobia (300.29) catalogued in
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM-IV, APA 1994).
A. Marked and persistent excessive fear, cued by
either being confronted with or thinking of the
workplace or workplace-related stimuli (e.g. colleagues,
superiors, situations, work duties).
B. Exposure to the workplace or thinking of it intensively
almost invariably provokes an immediate
anxiety response with physiological arousal which
may take the form of a panic attack.
C. The patient can but must not perceive the fear as
excessive or unreasonable. The person often feels
realistically endangered by situations, duties, or
persons at work.
D. The workplace is avoided or else is endured with
intense anxiety or distress. This avoidance often
leads to long term sick leave and endangers work
ability.
E. The avoidance, anxious anticipation, or distress
concerning the workplace interferes significantly
with the person's normal working routine, occupational
functioning, or work-related social activities or
relationships, or there is marked distress about
having the phobia.
F. Workplace phobia can occur in adult people who
are in the working age, that is between 18-65 years
of age.
G. The anxiety, panic attacks, or phobic avoidance
associated with the workplace can have developed
beside a primary conventional mental disorder,
such as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Posttraumatic
Stress Disorder, Separation Anxiety, Social
Phobia, Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia, or
Agoraphobia without history of Panic Disorder.
Workplace phobia shall be diagnosed when it leads
to a specific state of impairment which cannot be
explained through the primary or comorbid conventional
(mental) disorder.
H. In persons who are out of work, a workplace phobia
may be related to a past workplace or, in generalised
form, it may be related to any possible future
workplace (generalized workplace phobia).
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to the fact that avoidance through sick leave does only make
sense in case the anxiety-provoking stimulus is the workplace.
Interestingly, in the case of “common mental disorders
in the workforce” within an epidemiological study (Sanderson
& Andrews, 2006) it was found that depression and
anxiety were consistently associated with presenteeism.
It has also been found that different diagnostic groups of
psychiatric patients require different strategies for certifying
sick leave (Tritt et al., 2005). Thereby it was found that there
were patients with anxiety disorders and longer sick leave
who had a deterioration in symptoms over time, in contrast
to a group of anxiety patients with shorter or no prior sick
leave. Hereby workplace-related anxiety or workplace phobia
could play a major role as a moderating factor.
There are mainly two plausible theoretical explanations concerning
the narrow relationship between sick leave and
workplace phobia: On the one hand, the longer the duration
of sick leave due to any (not directly work-related) health
injury, the more a perception of workplace-related anxiety
may increase. This would mean workplace-related anxiety
develops as a result from enduring sick leave, because of
rising cognitions of uncertainty, worries, speculative anticipation
of possible changes or uncontrolled events happening at
work while the person is staying away, or even the anticipation
and fear to be “mobbed” by other colleagues after return
to work, because they had to do all the work of the
colleague who was missing a long time.
On the other hand, anxiety can have manifested at the
workplace first, for example in response to an awful frightening
experience there, and sick leave occurs in the following
as an avoidance behaviour, leads to immediate anxiety reduction
but in mean time maintains workplace-related anxiety so
that it eventually increases and ends in a workplace phobia.
These developments should be investigated in longitudinal
studies in future research.
The aspect of malingering symptoms in order to get on early
retirement is relevant in all mental and somatic disorders, it
does not seem specific for workplace phobia. From clinical
experience, patients with a desire for early retirement more
often focus on somatic disorders and general activity impairment
due to a general low state of health. This could be
due to the better acceptance of somatic disorders in comparison
to mental (often perceived as not objectively observable)
disorders.