IF YOU suffer a physical injury at work because of the negligence of your employer, there is little doubt that you have the basis of a claim for damages.
But what is your legal position if you suffer a psychiatric injury caused by work?
In practice, the courts have moved a long way since the time when compensation claims in cases of negligence were paid out only for physical injury.
The case of Dulieu v White in 1901 proved to be a landmark case in legal history because it established that compensation could be awarded for nervous shock.
This concerned an incident where a pregnant barmaid was so horrified when a horse driven van drove into the pub where she worked that she later gave birth prematurely.
While the facts in this case are unlikely to be repeated in the average high-street travel agency, it set a precedent that psychiatric injury was as much a form of personal injury as a broken bone.
While the courts have recognised this fact in numerous cases since the incident involving the unfortunate barmaid, it is still true to say it is exceptionally difficult to make a successful claim for a mental illness brought on by stress at work.
Former Thomas Cook employee Peter Maryniak discovered this when he sought to sue the agency group for negligence on the grounds that the stresses he suffered at work had caused him psychiatric illness and rendered him unfit for work.
In October 1998 Northampton County Court heard that the 46-year-old claimant had been employed by Thomas Cook as a travel agency manager since 1977.
He alleged that he had been the victim of unfair reports and had been demoted and in particular, he claimed that one of Thomas Cook’s regional managers had mounted a campaign to destroy his career.
In their defence, Thomas Cook maintained that as the business underwent modernisation, Maryniak had been rigid and inflexible in adapting to new working practices.
He failed in his claim because the court found his allegations were not supported by evidence.
Judge John Wilson quoting from the 1995 case of Walker v Northumberland County Council – now the benchmark case in stress at work litigation, said the law did not impose upon an employer the duty to guard against all injury or damage as the existence of some risk is a natural part of life.
But employers are asked to act reasonably. In the Walker v Northumberland County Council case, the claimant who suffered two nervous breakdowns because he was so overworked succeeded in his claim for damages.
The court found that while his employers were not liable for his first breakdown because it was not foreseeable, they were for the second one as, despite Walker’s pleas to resolve the staffing problem, they had done nothing to help him.
As a result, they should have foreseen that he was vulnerable to another collapse.
The case was subsequently settled for a total of £175,000.
In summary, a claimant who suffers a mental illness directly because of his or her work has the basis of a claim for negligence if it can be shown that the employer had foreseen, or should have foreseen, that there was a risk that this would happen and then had not acted reasonably to counter the risk.
In practice, any would-be claimant faces an uphill struggle to establish the claim and few cases ever come to trial.