Articles

Partner and founder Michael Inman, of the Chicago firm Inman & Fitzgibbons, Ltd., has been representing respondents in Illinois workers' compensation claims since 1979. He is well known in the workers' compensation legal community.

Below is an article entitled: Mental Stress on the Job. We hope you will find it helpful. If you would like to discuss a case, please contact our office.

---

Posted 4/7/2006

New Case on Mental Stress Favorable to Employers

The Appellate Court of Illinois for the 5th District has just issued a decision concerning physical injuries resulting from mental stress on the job that should kick the door open even wider for claimants who wish to attribute diseases from underlying conditions to the stress they are under at work. Following in the line of the Supreme Court's unfortunate Baggett decision, the Court upheld a Commission decision that an employee who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while giving a speech at a testimonial dinner for a retiring doctor sustained a compensable work injury from the aggravation to her underlying hypertension caused by her mental stress from giving the speech.

In Pickneyville Community Hospital v. The Industrial Commission (No. 5-05-0204WC, 5th Dist., March 2006) the petitioner, the Director of Nursing for the respondent, suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage and stroke while giving a speech at a dinner for a retiring physician. The issues on appeal were whether the dinner was a voluntary recreational activity and therefore not a work activity pursuant to Section 11 of the Act, and whether the petitioner's cerebral hemorrhage and stroke were medically causally related to the alleged work injury.

The bulk of the Appellate Court's decision dealt with the issue of whether the dinner was a voluntary recreational activity. The Appellate Court determined that it was not, and found that the dinner was a work activity covered by the Act since the petitioner was “ordered or assigned” to both attend and to speak at the dinner. In reaching this conclusion, the Appellate Court noted that the petitioner testified that the respondent's chief executive officer, John Schubert, had assigned her to speak at the dinner during a meeting. The Court also found the testimony of Dr. Fozard, the petitioner's personal physician and the respondent's chief of staff until 1997, to be persuasive. Dr. Fozard testified that “to the best of his knowledge,” it was Schubert who had asked the claimant to give the speech. It is interesting to note that neither the Commission nor the Appellate Court attributed much weight to the testimony of Mr. Schubert, who testified that he did not order anyone to speak at the event or direct or require any employees to attend the event.

The Appellate Court also rejected the respondent's medical causal connection argument, and noted that the Commission's decision was not against the manifest weight of the evidence. The experts on each side were in agreement that the petitioner had a long standing history of hypertension. The petitioner's experts opined that the stress of the speech led to an acute elevation of blood pressure that caused the hemorrhage and stroke. The respondent's experts, on the other hand, opined that the cause of the hemorrhage and stroke was the untreated hypertension. However, one of the respondent's expert physicians opined that it was possible, if the petitioner was very nervous about giving the speech, that it could have caused a release in adrenaline that would result in elevated blood pressure causing increased stresses on the blood vessels and possibly playing a role in the hemorrhage. In summation, the Appellate Court noted that the Commission had ample evidence from which it could conclude that the speech was a causative factor that accelerated or aggravated the petitioner's preexisting condition of hypertension.

More Articles: Anatomy of a Compensation Claim Representing a Respondent [10/24/2006] Supreme Court “Hands” Victory Back to Repetitive Trauma Claimant [04/07/2006] New Case on Mental Stress Favorable to Employers

For more information, please contact: Michael Inman Inman & Fitzgibbons, Ltd. 33 North Dearborn Street Suite 1825 Chicago, Illinois 60602 (312) 422-0550