This article addresses the nature and extent of employers' legal duties and obligations to protect their employees' psychiatric/psychological health and integrity from work-related risks and stressors. It focuses, in particular, on the employers' well-established common law duty of reasonable care for the health and safety of their employees and the ways in which this has been developed, adapted and applied by the Courts to the 'new' problem of work-related psychiatric or psychological injury. The central thesis is that any adaptation of the employer's common law duty has been at best partial, tending to individualize issues and in some respects reinforce existing negative stereotypes and assumptions around psychiatric/psychological ill health. It therefore goes on to consider what alternative and/or complementary legal principles exist in the UK that may help to underpin and reinforce employers' preventative obligations in this area. In this regard, the focus shifts to the potential utility of the modern implied contractual duty of mutual trust and confidence and the recent unexpected and controversial use of a piece of primarily criminal legislation, originally designed to combat the much wider social problem of 'stalking'.
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