Ohio: Mental Injury Must Be Caused by Physical Injury; It Need Not be Contemporaneous

Construing the Supreme Court of Ohio’s important, earlier decision in Armstrong v. John R. Jurgensen Co., 136 Ohio St. 3d 58, 2013-Ohio-2237, 990 N.E.2d 568, a lower-level Ohio appellate court held that while there must be a causal relationship between a claimant’s physical injury and his or her mental injury, the two need not necessarily occur contemporaneously. The court acknowledged that the passage of time would be a factor to be considered in factually determining whether a causal connection had been established, and could also make it more difficult for the claimant to establish such a connection, but the absence of a psychological injury at the time of the physical injury, or soon thereafter, was not determinative. Ohio is among the minority of states that do not provide benefits for purely mental injuries.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Coleman v. KBO, Inc., 2018-Ohio-763, 2018 Ohio App. LEXIS 799 (Mar. 2, 2018)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 56.04.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law