Opinion ID: 1159900
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Greater Than All Employees Must Experience Test.

Text: The Board applied the greater than all employees must experience test in this case. Courts that have adopted this test have often expressed a fear that due to the difficulty in determining the causes of mental illness, failure to impose additional objective requirements would open the flood gates to fraudulent mental injury claims. E.g., School District # 1, 215 N.W.2d at 377. Courts also often state that worker's compensation acts were not designed to make employers general insurers, which could happen if there were no objective threshold requirements, since some causal connection between the mental illness and employment could be established in most cases. E.g., Townsend, 404 A.2d at 1018-19. Alascom argues that the greater than all employees must experience test is appropriate to ensure that the injury arise out of employment by providing that there is some objective, realistic, connection between the injury and the employment. While we recognize these concerns, we reject the greater than all employees must experience test, or any other additional objective threshold requirement, for several reasons. First, we are unconvinced that requiring a showing of stress greater than all employees must experience will make it more likely that employment was a contributing cause of the mental injury. The existence of a mental impact stimulus or unusual excessive mental employment stresses, however, does not medically assure the genuineness of the causal relationship between a worker's mental disability and his employment any more than does the existence of a physical impact. The intensity of the mental stresses is etiologically irrelevant. The metaphorical description of the threshold limitations by courts as sufficient badge[s] of reliability, therefore, is accurate: like the objective criteria in tort actions for emotional injury, these badges at best assure the appearance of an objective causal relation. Joseph, 36 Vand.L.Rev. at 305 (emphasis in original) (footnotes omitted); see Comment, 70 Yale L.J. at 1138-45. We therefore think that the greater than all employees must experience test is neither essential nor even germane to the legislative requirement that the injury arise out of the employment. Second, we believe the argument that threshold requirements are necessary for mental injuries because such injuries are easier to feign than physical injuries is unsubstantiated. There is no evidence that it will be easier to feign or more difficult to detect complex patterns of psychoneurotic reactions than certain physical injuries. See Comment, 70 Yale L.J. at 1137. Finally, and most importantly, we think that adoption of the greater than all employees must experience requirement is contrary to the fundamental principle in workers' compensation law that the Act should be read liberally and that the employer must take the employee as he finds him. See, e.g., S.L.W. v. Alaska Workmen's Compensation Board, 490 P.2d 42, 44 (Alaska 1971); Wilson v. Erickson, 477 P.2d 998, 1000 (Alaska 1970). There will be employees who will suffer mental injuries from usual, everyday, employment stresses. Under this requirement these eggshell employees would not be compensated for their injuries, because the stress to which they succumbed was a stress to which the average worker would not have succumbed. Several jurisdictions have rejected the greater than all employees must experience requirement on the explicit or implicit grounds that the employer must take the employee as he finds him, and that there is nothing in the workers' compensation statute that implies there should be any different rule for mental illness. See Royal State National Insurance Co. v. Labor & Industrial Relations Appeal Board, 53 Hawaii 32, 487 P.2d 278, 282 (1971); Yocom v. Pierce, 534 S.W.2d 796, 798-800 (Ky. 1976); Breeden v. Workmen's Compensation Comm'r, 285 S.E.2d 398, 400 (W. Va. 1981); McGarrah v. SAIF, 296 Or. 145, 675 P.2d 159, 167 (1983); Albertson's, Inc. v. Workers' Compensation Appeals Bd. of State of California, 131 Cal. App.3d 308, 182 Cal. Rptr. 304, 307 (1982). We agree with these decisions. Greater stress than all employees must experience does not insure that the injury arises out of employment. While no test can adequately insure this, we have not imposed additional threshold requirements in physical injury cases where it was difficult to determine whether employment was a causal factor. See, e.g., Providence Washington Insurance Co. v. Bonner, 680 P.2d 96 (Alaska 1984). In Delaney v. Alaska Airlines, 693 P.2d 859 (Alaska 1985), a pilot who had Crohn's disease claimed compensation. We rejected Delaney's claim that Crohn's disease was an occupational disease of airplane pilots caused by excessively stressful conditions because there had been no medical testimony that the disease had originally been caused by conditions of employment. Id. at 862. Therefore the preliminary link between the illness and the employment had not been established. We then stated that the preliminary link had been established as to whether the employment conditions aggravated, accelerated or combined with a pre-existing disease to produce disability. Id. at 863. We held, however, that the employer had produced substantial evidence that employment stress was not a contributing factor, based on unequivocal expert testimony, and therefore had rebutted the presumption of compensability. Id. at 863. While ultimately rejecting the employee's claim in Delaney, we did not vary from the traditional analysis even though the question of whether the employment contributed to the injury was novel and difficult. We see no reason to vary from the traditional analysis in mental injury cases by imposing additional requirements on the quality or quantity of employment conditions. No legal approach can be entirely accurate in this area because there is insufficient scientific knowledge regarding what actually causes mental disorders. The creation of additional requirements that do not necessarily bear on whether there is a connection between the injury and the employment, and which per se exclude a class of claimants from legislatively directed compensation coverage, is not the way to deal with this reality.