“Crisi d’ansia reattiva”: un caso particolare di infortunio sul lavoro

Abstract

["Anxiety-crisis": a special case of an accident at work]

To date, only a few case reports have been published on psychiatric disease due to an accident at work. In this article we describe a case of an employee who entered the emergency room after a verbal altercation with superiors and colleagues, complaining about turmoil. The diagnosis of “anxiety crisis” due to accident at work was made (“bullying”), and therefore the insurer (INAIL) justified the 105-day absence which followed this episode. The case was then submitted to a re-evaluation by INAIL itself, that this time judged only the 30 days following the altercation to be related to the accident at work, considering the remaining days to be due to a common disease, not attributable to the traumatic event. Here we discuss the peculiar features of this case: the nature of the illness diagnosed, the kind of onset, and the management of the injury by the health care authority (INAIL).