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Vicki A. Laden and Gregory Schwartz Psychiatric Disabilities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the New WorkplaceViolence Account A few years ago, a new video game hit computer stores, promising killing “[s]o freakin’ real, your victims actually beg for mercy and scream for their lives!”1 The game is called “Postal” and is based on a disgruntled, psychotic postal worker arming himself to the teeth and systematically shooting his way through several different scenarios, including a schoolyard, a construction site, and a marching band. The victims, primarily innocent, unarmed bystanders, do not die immediately. Instead, the player must decide whether to let victims beg for mercy or execute them immediately. The disgruntled postal worker periodically complains, “[O]nly my weapon understands me.” The makers of the game did not create this image out of whole cloth. The image of the disgruntled postal worker who explodes in senseless, random violence had already entered popular culture, symbolizing the potential lethality of the psychotic worker. So embedded in popular discourse is this account that newspapers, television programs, movies, attorneys, and schoolchildren refer to episodes of unexplained, individual violence as “going postal.”2 The threat of occupational injury or death, once represented by dangerous machinery or hazardous environments, has now become discursively located in conceptions of the “pathogenic worker,” lurking unnoticed in the workplace, poised to explode in lethal violence against his supervisors or coworkers. We might refer to the set of stories, images, attributions, and prescriptions associated with this imagery as the new workplace violence account. This new workplace violence account, we will argue, plays a role in attempts to delegitimize the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Deploying vivid media representations of volatile, psychotic employees, ADA critics suggest that the act has deprived employers of the ability to protect employees from criminal assault by dangerous coworkers. Riding 189 the coattails of this account, and in circular fashion both lending authority to and deriving epistemological authority from it, is a burgeoning workplace violence prevention industry composed of employment defense law ‹rms, security experts, and consultants who counsel employers on how to identify and remove potentially violent workers in the “hands-tied” era of the ADA.3 This rapidly expanding violence prevention industry advances bold claims about the enormity and severity of the problem, reinforcing a key premise of ADA critics that the ADA unreasonably subordinates public safety interests to the “special rights” of the disabled. This fear-inducing account is predicated on two assumptions: ‹rst, that worker-on-worker violence is a signi‹cant problem; and second, that it can be reduced or prevented through the identi‹cation and exclusion of “high risk” workers. Signi‹cantly, however, data collected on workplace violence and empirical research on prediction of violence contradict both of these claims.4 The incidence of worker-on-worker violence is in‹nitesimally small.5 Violent acts by “pathogenic” employees are trivial contributors to workplace morbidity and mortality, in stark contrast to injuries and deaths caused by environmental conditions, from which attention is diverted by the new workplace violence account.6 Undeterred by a lack of empirical support for the claim that worker-onworker violence constitutes an important social problem, the workplace violence industry advertises its technical prowess in identifying potentially dangerous workers.7 In doing so, it ignores a large body of empirical research establishing that prediction of violence, even by skilled clinicians in highly controlled in-patient settings, is dubious at best.8 In the hands of employers, the “tools” for predicting violence by individuals operating within a wide array of uncontrolled situational contexts have even less prognostic validity or reliability. Given the crude methods available for purported prediction of violence, it is unsurprising that individuals with psychiatric disabilities face intensi‹ed scrutiny and efforts based on diagnostic categories. Claims that individuals with psychiatric disabilities harbor the potential for violence tap into a deep reservoir of transhistorical fear and stigma-induced stereotyping that enactment of the ADA did little to drain.9 That individuals with psychiatric disabilities ‹nd themselves at the center of the political/judicial debate over the ADA owes as much to this historical legacy as it does to the discursive in›uence of the new workplace violence prevention industry. One can observe these old fears and stereotypes, and the junk science they animate, operating in a variety of legal contexts, including trends toward permitting the introduction of propensity evidence in sexual assault cases, 190 Backlash Against the ADA [3.134.104.173] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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