Court Opinion

ID: 9743157
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:26:45.111559+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:22:25.577646
License: Public Domain

Ryan, J.
(dissenting). By Justice Levin’s opinion, the majority has adopted the "chain of causation” *18test to determine whether a deceased’s suicide was the product of a personal injury arising out of and in the course of his employment. This test is described in Trombley v Coldwater State Home & Training School, 366 Mich 649, 664; 115 NW2d 561 (1962), as follows:
"Some few American courts, Florida, California, New York, Mississippi, and recently Illinois, follow a rule which, generally speaking, allows compensation upon a showing of causal connection between the decedent’s employment, his injury or mental disorder and his suicide. This approach regards such suicide as a compensable consequence of a work-connected injury or mental disorder, not as an intervening cause of death. It also obviates the necessity for assessing the 'precise quality’ ... of the decedent’s mental condition at the moment of suicide to the extent required by Sponatski [220 Mass 526; 108 NE 466 (1915)]. In those States, like Michigan, which have statutory provisions barring recovery of compensation if injury or death results from intentional or wilful action by the decedent employee, the decedent’s mental derangement need only be found to have so impaired his reasoning faculties that his act of suicide was not voluntary in the sense that term is used to describe rational choice of alternatives.” (Emphasis added, citations and footnotes omitted.)
The proper application of this test requires the WCAB to make explicit factual findings regarding the causal link between the employment and the injury, and between the injury and the act of suicide. Compare Reynolds Metals Co v Industrial Comm, 119 Ariz 566; 582 P2d 656 (1978). In order to establish this latter nexus, it must be shown that Hammons’ mental injury was of such a quality as to have so impaired his reasoning faculties that his act of suicide was not the product of a rational mind. See Trombley, supra.
Although, perhaps, the WCAB’s opinion can be *19read, as the majority has done, as containing an "implicit finding” that Hammons suffered a personal injury in the course of his employment, it does not contain any indication that the WCAB examined the relationship between Hammons’ injury and his act of suicide. The opinion indicates that the WCAB merely assumed a causal link between the injury and the act of suicide. Since the test articulated by the majority did not exist as a part of Michigan workers’ compensation law until today, it is not particularly surprising that the WCAB’s opinion does not comport with the test which the majority has announced.
Because the WCAB has not made a factual finding regarding whether or not Hammons’ injury was of such a quality as to have rendered him incapable of rational choice, we would remand this case to the WCAB in order to permit that body to carry out its fact-finding function.
Brickley and Boyle, JJ., concurred with Ryan, J.