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An employee who has a stressful job and develops a disability related to mental illness is not entitled to collect workers’ compensation payments if the stresses to which he was exposed were no more severe than those experienced by his coworkers, according to a recent Pennsylvania court ruling.
The court chose not to apply state workers’ compensation regulations that permit an individual to retire on disability if that person suffers a serious physical injury while performing routine tasks that are part of the job.
The case, Linskey v. Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board (699A.2d 818 [Pennsylvania Commonwealth, 1997]), arose when a firefighter who was assigned periodic emergency rescue squad duties filed a workers’ compensation claim with his employer, the Philadelphia Fire Department, according to a report in the December 1997 issue of the Forensic Echo. During a rescue squad shift, he responded to a call and found a man who had hanged himself.
Linskey was so traumatized by this incident that he began seeing a psychologist. Six years after the incident, and after he had been transferred to another fire station that required him to do rescue squad duty every three to four weeks instead of every five, as had been the case at the previous assignment, he was hospitalized because of suicidal tendencies. He stopped working and filed a workers’ compensation claim. A judge assigned to adjudicate such cases ruled in his favor; namely, that his rescue squad duties led to his psychiatric disability.
The fire department appealed, contending that he had experienced the routine stresses of the job he chose and was not subjected to situations any more troubling than were his coworkers. An appeals judge agreed with the fire department and overturned that judge’s decision.
Linskey then appealed to a state court, where to succeed he would have had to prove that the stressors that caused his disability were unique to him and not routine in a job that is inherently stressful.
The state court was not swayed by Linskey’s arguments about the increase in rescue squad shifts or the traumatic nature of the types of events he witnesses, which it said were part of normal working conditions for a Philadelphia firefighter. The court and the compensation appeals board both apparently elected to examine and base their rulings on issues other than the severity of Linskey’s disability.
Psychiatrist Robert Miller, M.D., director of the forensic psychiatry program at the Colorado Health Sciences Center, commented on the discriminatory way the courts interpreted Linskey’s claim.
"Had he received physical injuries, he would presumably have been eligible for benefits, even though his working conditions were not abnormal," Miller noted. "Further, had he developed his mental disorder while in military service, where death and dismemberment are certainly not ‘abnormal working conditions,’ he would have been eligible for disability payments."
He added that with PTSD now the fastest-growing basis for disability claims for both police and firefighters, "limiting coverage for PTSD clearly saves money for governments and corporations. . . . Ultimately, the issue boils down to social choice between budget cutting and support for disabled individuals. Budget cutting wins."