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Belcher v. T. Rowe Price Foundation Inc.3/25/1993
n tort and in workmen's compensation. But the excuse no longer exists. And therefore a state which would withhold the benefits of workmen's compensation from a man who, before an obvious industrial mishap, was a competent, respected iron-worker, and after the mishap was totally incapacitated to do the only job he was trained for, would nowadays be doing unjustifiable violence to the intent of the workmen's compensation act, for reasons that are without support in either legal or medical theory.
Larson, ยง 42.23 at 7-906 (emphasis added). See Sparks v. Tulane Med. Ctr. Hosp. & Clinic, 546 So.2d 138, 147 (La.1989). There is a caution, however. As Sparks puts it at 147:
We emphasize, however, that a mere showing that a mental injury was related to general conditions of employment, or to incidents occurring over an extended period of time, is not enough to entitle the claimant to
compensation. The mental injury must be precipitated by an accident, i.e., an unexpected and unforeseen event that occurs suddenly or violently.
(Emphasis in original; footnote omitted). The cases note that
by rejecting the "nineteenth century approach" of making the availability of benefits dependent upon a rigid and absolute distinction between physical and mental injuries, . . . we reach a result that has been approved by a majority of the jurisdictions in this country.
Id.
VI
Due to the interest and concern of others than the immediate parties in the question before us, we granted a request to file a brief by amici curiae. The amici curiae participating in the brief stated that they
represent the entire spectrum of the workers' compensation payors in Maryland -- self-insured employers, the Injured Workers' Insurance Fund, and trade organizations representing the overwhelming majority of workers' compensation insurers in the State.
They speak, of course, in support of T. Rowe Price and its insurer, and they proclaim that each of them
has a significant interest in seeing that workers' compensation coverage in Maryland remains limited to claims wherein an employee has a definite, immediate physical injury as a result of a work-related occurrence. n
The amici curiae urge that "the Maryland Workers' Compensation law should not be judicially expanded to include as 'accidental personal injuries' claims for mental conditions
that involve no physical injury to the body." The gist of their argument is that we should adhere to the construction of the terminology used in the Act as requiring a physical injury to the body as a prerequisite to compensability which the Maryland courts have observed for more than half a century. They point out that "other states with statutory language and prior case law similar to that of Maryland have rejected attempts to judicially expand workers' compensation coverage to include non-physical injuries." We believe that we have fully answered such lines of argument, and we are not persuaded otherwise by the amici curiae. They do not acknowledge, as we have found, that
enerally, the trend in the law has been towards granting awards for mental injury resulting from mental stress.
Marc A. Antonetti, Labor Law: Workers' Compensation Statutes and the Recovery of Emotional Distress Damages in the Absence of Physical Injury , 1990 Annual Survey of American Law 671 at 695. Antonetti, in his analysis of the trend, sees the same justification in allowing mental-mental claims as we found:
This trend toward allowing the mental-mental claim is justified by both the goals of workers' compensation laws an
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