Depression, anxiety increase among injured workers: Medrisk

Injured workers self-reporting anxiety and depression increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with numbers jumping “significantly” between 2019 and 2020 and not returning to pre-pandemic rates in 2022 as the pandemic waned, according to an industry trends report released Tuesday by Medrisk Inc.

In 2019, 24.4% of injured workers reported they had anxiety, 19.8% reported depression and 14.8 reported symptoms of both; and in 2022, 30% reported they had anxiety, 23.5% reported depression and 20.5% reported both, according to data compiled by Medrisk, which manages physical medicine services for injured workers.

The report also found that injured employees reporting anxiety and depression have a 7% higher utilization of physical therapy than those who did not report these conditions.

Other trends cited in the report pertained to aging and injured workers and a higher utilization of physical therapy: injured employees aged 56 and older have 21% more physical therapy visits than those aged 18 to 55; and injured employees aged 56 and older have a 31% longer duration of overall physical therapy treatment than those aged 18 to 55.