Australia has made significant progress in recognising psychological risk as a work health and safety issue rather than simply an individual wellbeing issue. The introduction of psychosocial hazard regulations, increased regulatory attention, and a growing body of guidance material have helped shift the conversation away from resilience, wellness programs and employee assistance schemes towards a more sophisticated understanding of how work itself can contribute to psychological harm.
Employers are now being asked to identify psychosocial hazards, assess the risks arising from those hazards, implement reasonably practicable controls and monitor the effectiveness of those controls over time. Increasingly, psychosocial hazards are being treated in the same way as any other workplace risk. Workload, role clarity, organisational change, workplace conflict, bullying, inadequate support and poor management practices are now recognised as legitimate work health and safety concerns with the potential to contribute to psychological injury, workers’ compensation claims and regulatory action.
This represents an important and necessary shift. However, despite the progress that has been made, there remains a significant gap in the conversation. Much of the current discussion assumes a relatively homogeneous workforce and pays little attention to the ways in which psychosocial hazards may be experienced differently by different groups of workers. In particular, there has been remarkably little discussion about the experience of neurodivergent workers and the implications this has for psychosocial risk management.
Over the past four years I have had hundreds of conversations with neurodivergent workers through coaching engagements, workplace assessments, return-to-work programs, occupational health interventions and consulting projects. These conversations have involved people from a wide range of professions and industries including healthcare, aviation, education, research, professional services, emergency services and government. Although each individual’s circumstances are unique, the themes that emerge are surprisingly consistent.
Contrary to what many employers assume, most do not identify their neurodivergence as the primary source of workplace distress. Rather, they describe the cumulative impact of working within systems, processes and environments that were designed without any real consideration of cognitive diversity. They describe expending enormous amounts of energy attempting to adapt to workplace expectations that appear straightforward to others, but which may require substantially greater cognitive effort for them to navigate successfully.
The Hidden Cost of Masking
One of the most common themes emerging from these conversations is masking. Research increasingly recognises masking, or camouflaging, as the conscious suppression of natural behaviours to appear neurotypical. In practical terms, this may involve monitoring facial expressions, rehearsing conversations, forcing eye contact, suppressing sensory discomfort, carefully managing emotional responses and continually analysing social interactions.
While masking can help an individual navigate a workplace environment, it comes at a cost. Many workers describe it as exhausting. Some report spending so much energy managing how they are perceived by others that they have little capacity left for the work itself. Others describe a gradual decline in confidence, increasing anxiety and a growing sense of disconnection from their work and colleagues.
Importantly, masking can create a dangerous illusion for employers. A worker who appears calm, productive and engaged may be experiencing significant levels of stress beneath the surface. The absence of complaints or requests for support should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that a workplace is psychologically safe. In many cases, it may simply indicate that the individual has concluded it is safer not to disclose their difficulties.
Psychological Safety Begins Before People Speak Up
This brings us to an aspect of psychological safety that receives far less attention than it deserves. Workplace culture specialist Theo Smith recently observed that psychological safety is often measured by whether people feel safe enough to speak up. Most definitions of psychological safety emphasise the ability to raise concerns, ask questions, admit mistakes and contribute ideas without fear of humiliation or negative consequences.
These are important indicators. However, for many neurodivergent workers, psychological safety begins much earlier than that. It begins with the decision about whether it is safe to disclose their neurodivergence at all.
Many of the workers I have spoken with describe disclosure as one of the most difficult decisions of their professional lives. Disclosure creates vulnerability. It requires individuals to trust that the information they share will be treated respectfully, confidentially and constructively.
Unfortunately, that trust is not always rewarded.
When Disclosure Increases Risk Instead of Reducing It
While some workers report positive experiences following disclosure, many describe a noticeable shift in how they are treated by managers and colleagues. In some cases, requests for adjustments are interpreted as a lack of resilience. In others, previously valued behaviours are suddenly viewed through a deficit lens. Workers who had been regarded as capable, high-performing professionals find themselves subjected to increased scrutiny, closer supervision or formal performance management processes shortly after disclosing.
Several individuals have described the experience as losing a professional identity they had spent years building. They were no longer viewed as an experienced lawyer, manager, engineer, researcher or clinician who happened to be neurodivergent. Instead, they became the ADHD employee, the autistic employee or the employee with “special needs”. The diagnosis became the lens through which all future interactions were interpreted.
What is particularly striking is that the psychological harm often arises not from the disclosure itself, but from the organisational response that follows. Workers disclose in the hope of obtaining understanding, support and practical adjustments. Too often, however, they find themselves navigating increased anxiety, uncertainty and workplace tension at precisely the point they expected to feel safer.
The Neurodivergent Experience of Psychosocial Harm
One of the challenges in discussing psychosocial hazards and neurodiversity is that many of the risks experienced by neurodivergent workers are largely invisible to those around them.
When employers think about psychosocial hazards, they often focus on factors such as workload, bullying, conflict, role ambiguity or organisational change. These are undoubtedly important. However, conversations with neurodivergent workers suggest that the experience of psychosocial harm is often far more nuanced and frequently arises from the interaction between the individual and their work environment rather than from any single event.
Executive functioning difficulties provide a good example. Many workers describe the frustration of being highly capable, knowledgeable and committed to their work while simultaneously struggling with task initiation, prioritisation, working memory or cognitive overload. Several professionals have described spending hours attempting to commence a task that they genuinely wanted to complete, only to become increasingly distressed as deadlines approached. To colleagues and managers, this may appear to be procrastination, poor organisation or a lack of motivation. To the individual experiencing it, the situation can generate profound shame, self-criticism and anxiety.
Others describe the emotional exhaustion associated with constantly masking their difficulties. One professional described spending so much energy trying to appear organised, productive and in control that there was little capacity left for the actual work. Another spoke about feeling as though they were performing a role every day, carefully monitoring every interaction, every email and every conversation in an effort to avoid being judged negatively.
Communication differences are another common source of psychosocial risk. Many neurodivergent workers value direct, clear and unambiguous communication. In safety-critical environments, these characteristics are often highly beneficial. Yet workers frequently report being labelled as blunt, difficult, argumentative or lacking emotional intelligence when their communication style differs from social expectations. In some cases, legitimate concerns about safety, quality or process improvement are dismissed because the message is perceived as confronting, even when the underlying issue is valid.
For some workers, the physical work environment itself becomes a psychosocial hazard. Open-plan offices, constant interruptions, competing conversations, fluorescent lighting, hot-desking arrangements and unpredictable changes may appear relatively minor inconveniences to some workers. For others, these factors create a state of ongoing hypervigilance and cognitive fatigue. One professional described repeatedly providing medical evidence regarding difficulties associated with travelling in high-speed lifts and working on a high-rise floor, only to have the issue dismissed as a matter of personal preference rather than a legitimate workplace concern.
A growing number of workers are also describing what has become known as “brownout”. Unlike traditional burnout, which is often associated with exhaustion following periods of excessive workload, brownout is characterised by a gradual erosion of cognitive and emotional resources. Workers describe feeling overwhelmed, mentally stuck and increasingly unable to initiate tasks or make decisions. Importantly, they often continue to care deeply about their work and remain highly motivated to perform well. The issue is not a lack of commitment but a growing mismatch between workplace demands and available cognitive resources.
Perhaps one of the least understood psychosocial risks affecting many neurodivergent workers is rejection sensitivity. Although Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria is not currently recognised as a formal diagnostic condition, it is widely reported by many people with ADHD and is increasingly discussed within the clinical and research literature. Individuals describe experiencing criticism, perceived disapproval or interpersonal conflict with an intensity that can be disproportionate to the triggering event. What may appear to one person as routine feedback can be experienced by another as deeply distressing and emotionally overwhelming.
This is not simply a matter of being overly sensitive. For many individuals, these reactions occur against a backdrop of lifelong experiences of criticism, misunderstanding, social exclusion or repeated messages that they are not meeting expectations. By adulthood, many have accumulated years of negative experiences that influence how they interpret and respond to workplace interactions.
Performance feedback remains an essential part of effective management and employers have every right to address performance concerns. However, the manner in which feedback is delivered can have a profound impact on psychological safety. A manager may genuinely believe they are providing fair and reasonable feedback, yet if that feedback is delivered publicly, lacks context, is unnecessarily adversarial or focuses exclusively on deficits without support or guidance, the psychological impact can be significant.
This raises an important question regarding the concept of reasonableness.
Across work health and safety, workers’ compensation, workplace investigations, discrimination law and employment disputes, decision-makers frequently rely upon concepts such as the “reasonable person” or “reasonable worker”. Too often, however, this is interpreted as though there is a single objective standard against which all experiences should be measured.
The legal reality is often more nuanced. Courts and tribunals have long recognised that reasonableness is assessed within the circumstances of the individual concerned. The question is not simply what any hypothetical reasonable person (“the man on the Clapham bus”) would think or feel, but what a reasonable person in the position of the claimant might experience in the same circumstances.
This distinction matters when considering neurodivergent workers. If an individual experiences sensory overload, executive functioning challenges, communication differences or heightened sensitivity to criticism as part of their neurodivergent functioning, then those experiences form part of the context in which reasonableness and foreseeability should be assessed. The objective is not to lower standards or excuse inappropriate behaviour. Rather, it is to recognise that fairness requires us to consider how different workers experience the same workplace conditions. Reasonableness requires context.
From a psychosocial risk management perspective, the relevant question is not whether a neurotypical worker would have been distressed by a particular workplace practice. The question is whether it was reasonably foreseeable that this worker, in these circumstances, could experience harm as a result of that practice.
Reframing Neurodiversity as a Work Design Issue
This distinction is important because it shifts our attention away from the individual and back towards the workplace. From a work health and safety perspective, the relevant question is not whether neurodivergent workers experience stress, anxiety or burnout. The relevant question is whether aspects of the work environment, management systems or organisational culture are creating foreseeable psychosocial risks that could reasonably be identified and controlled.
Viewed through this lens, many of the challenges described by neurodivergent workers begin to look less like individual deficits and more like work design issues. Sensory overload arising from open-plan offices, constant interruptions and excessive noise may represent an environmental hazard. Chronic masking may indicate a lack of psychological safety. Communication breakdowns may reflect organisational systems that rely heavily on implicit expectations and unwritten rules. Burnout and brownout may be symptoms of a sustained mismatch between workplace demands and an individual’s cognitive profile rather than a failure of resilience or motivation.
Why This Matters for Employers
The implications for employers are significant. If organisations are serious about managing psychosocial hazards, then neurodiversity cannot remain a peripheral diversity and inclusion issue. It must become part of the psychosocial risk conversation. Risk assessments that fail to consider cognitive diversity are likely to overlook important sources of risk. Similarly, control measures that appear effective for most workers may be far less effective for neurodivergent employees.
The challenge for employers is not to create separate systems for neurodivergent workers. Rather, it is to ensure that existing systems are sufficiently flexible, inclusive and psychologically safe to accommodate a diverse workforce. This requires meaningful consultation, clear communication, thoughtful work design and management practices that recognise individual differences without pathologising them.
The Real Test of Psychological Safety
The true test of psychological safety is not whether an organisation has a neurodiversity policy, celebrates Neurodiversity Celebration Week or publishes statements about inclusion on its website.
The true test is what happens after disclosure.
It is whether workers feel heard, respected and included. It is whether they are consulted about solutions rather than having solutions imposed upon them. It is whether they retain their autonomy, dignity and professional identity. It is whether disclosure results in understanding and support rather than increased scrutiny and suspicion.
Australia has made important progress in recognising psychosocial hazards and imposing stronger obligations on employers to protect psychological health at work. That progress should be acknowledged and applauded. However, if neurodivergent workers remain largely invisible within that framework, then we are still only seeing part of the picture.
And in work health and safety, blind spots have a habit of turning into incidents and injuries.