Ms Shirley Douglas v Hometrust Care Limited — 2019

At this preliminary hearing, Ms Shirley Douglas said she was disabled from about June 2018 because of stress, anxiety and related symptoms arising from her separation, divorce proceedings, criminal proceedings involving allegations about her child, and an earlier breast-lump scare. The tribunal accepted that she had experienced symptoms such as racing heartbeat, vibrating sensations, difficulty concentrating, and periods when she found supermarket shopping or returning home alone at night difficult, and it accepted that she had been prescribed Sertraline and Diazepam and had seen her GP regularly.

The tribunal nevertheless found that the contemporary medical records did not show a formal diagnosis of depression or anxiety. It treated the fit notes as referring to stress or marital breakdown, and gave little weight to the later GP letter of 24 June 2019 because the earlier records did not support a change from stress to an underlying impairment. Applying section 6 of the Equality Act 2010 and the Schedule 1 guidance, it held that the evidence showed a stress reaction to adverse personal circumstances rather than a proved physical or mental impairment.

The tribunal also found that the claimant had not shown a substantial adverse effect on normal day-to-day activities. It noted that she lived alone but maintained an active social life, was able to work until June 2018, could sometimes shop for herself, and had not given sufficiently specific evidence of substantial functional limitation. In the alternative, even if there had been an impairment, the tribunal held that it was not shown to be long term by January 2019 because her own case was that the condition began in June 2018 and the evidence suggested it was tied to the progress and outcome of her divorce proceedings. The disability discrimination claim was therefore dismissed; the unfair dismissal, notice pay and holiday pay claims were not determined at this hearing and were left for listing to a final hearing.