If the rise were driven primarily by genuine psychological deterioration – caused by economic hardship, housing costs, social media or job insecurity – one would expect it to track fairly evenly across the political spectrum, as physical illness does. It does not. That finding suggests at least part of what surveys are capturing is a shift in how certain cultural communities conceptualise inner experience, rather than a uniform deterioration in the psychological health of a generation.
The most common causes of serious mental stress claims in Australia in 2023-24 were harassment and workplace bullying (33.2%), work pressure (24.2%), and exposure to violence and harassment (15.7%), according to Safe Work Australia. These are specific, identifiable workplace hazards – not vague references to life difficulty. Harassment and bullying causing psychological harm is a categorically different problem from the broad labelling shift Burn-Murdoch documents. The question for Australian employers is which part of the 17,600 claims falls into which category. Current data cannot cleanly separate them.
Specific causes, not vague distress
Most common causes of serious mental stress claims, Australia, 2023/24
A third of claims originate from harassment and bullying — specific, identifiable workplace hazards. The distribution matters: these are categorically different problems from the broad cultural shift in how mental health difficulty is labelled.
AU serious MH claim causes 2023/24: harassment/bullying 33.2%, work pressure 24.2%, violence/harassment 15.7%.
Source: Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025 (October 2025), as reported in peer-reviewed analysis by SafetySure (2025). All three figures confirmed. The three categories shown account for 73.1% of claims; the remaining 26.9% comprises other causes not separately itemised in the source publication.
The Australian dimension
Persephone Stuckey-Clarke, partner in the employment and safety team at Dentons, told HRD that the regulatory shift has moved businesses from being reactive to complaints to being required to take a far more proactive approach to managing mental health. That shift is legally appropriate. It also creates conditions in which the formal classification of psychological difficulty as compensable harm becomes a more natural step for workers who might previously have managed through informal means or left the job.
An employee experiencing the normal difficulties of a demanding workplace – conflict with a manager, excessive workload, uncertainty during a restructure – now operates within a framework that actively encourages them to consider whether those difficulties constitute a psychosocial hazard. Whether this represents a genuine uncovering of previously hidden harm, or a progressive reclassification of ordinary working difficulty as compensable injury, is a question the current data cannot definitively answer.
Frederik Anseel, Dean of UNSW Business School and Professor of Management, made the broader generational point to HRD: many so-called Gen Z traits reflect a natural stage of transition into professional life, rather than an entirely new phenomenon. “Every new generation of young people comes with energy, new ways of speaking, and new ways of working. They’re not used to the workplace yet, and that can cause friction – but it’s the same story we saw with millennials 20 years ago,” he said. The legal obligations on Australian employers are real, and the genuine harm behind many claims is real. Not every number in the statistics represents the same type of problem.
