Remote Work, Isolation, and Psychiatric Functional Capacity: Fitness-for-Duty Opinions When the Job Has No Office

Stephan M. Carlson, MD, MBA, FAPA · Employment and Fitness

When a claimant works from a spare bedroom, the usual proof of impaired workplace functioning—what supervisors and coworkers saw day to day—largely disappears. The forensic challenge is to assess essential-function capacity without the contemporaneous behavioral record that traditional fitness opinions were built on. Why remote and hybrid arrangements change the question A psychiatric fitness-for-duty or disability opinion has always turned on a comparison: the demands of the specific job against the individual's current capacity to meet them. Remote and hybrid work disrupts both halves of that comparison. On the demand side, the "essential functions" of a role become contested when the offi

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