PTSD Claims Present Special Challenges for Carriers
Texas is known as a mental/mental state when it comes to injuries involving emotional trauma claims. This means that a claimant need not allege or prove the existence of a physical injury before she can recover for a mental trauma injury. For the most part, however, such claims must be traceable to a specific time, place, and event to be compensable. Transportation Insurance Co. v. Maksyn, 580 S.W.2d 334 (Tex. 1979).
BusinessInsurance.Com examines the rise of such claims in the workers’ compensation arena and explains how difficult such claims can be to diagnose and treat.
Dr. Roger Pitman, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who worked with Vietnam veterans as a Department of Veterans Affairs clinician for 30 years, said in the instance of a traumatic event, PTSD is diagnosed using “specific criteria” in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Commonly referred to as the DSM-5, to be diagnosed with PTSD a patient must have been exposed or witness to a life-threatening event, along with a list of other symptoms that must be present, such as lack of function, irritability, aggression, difficulty sleeping or concentrating.
The rules for compensability of such claims in Texas vary for some job classifications. Our firm is happy to assist you in evaluating the compensability of such claims.
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