Neither full disclosure nor isolation: selective non-contact during psychological-injury sickness absence in police officers

Police officers carry a high burden of work-related psychological injury, and many follow a familiar path: they keep working as symptoms build, eventually take sick leave and then go quiet, cutting contact with their team and their employer. Clinicians and return-to-work programmes usually read that silence as illness-driven avoidance and try to restore contact. I propose that some of it is strategy. An officer who tells the organisation how unwell they are cannot take the information back: the organisation records it, classifies it and acts on it. By withholding information from the employer while staying in touch with trusted people outside its systems, the officer keeps the meaning of the absence open and protects the option of returning to the role. In Goffman’s terms, the absence is known, but its reason is not. That concealment protects a competent-worker identity that is already established; my contribution is a prediction that no existing account makes. Amongst officers on psychological-injury leave, selective withholding—restricting contact that would formally declare unfitness while keeping some relational contact—should predict sustained return to work better than either full disclosure or complete isolation. The standard reading predicts a straight line from more contact to better outcomes; this account predicts a bend in the middle. I test the idea against four rival explanations, show how sex and diagnosis should moderate it, identify the confounds any test must handle and outline a two-stage design using New South Wales injury-management records. I also offer a preliminary, non-validated clinical formulation grid. The prediction is untested, and I hold it with low-to-moderate confidence.