Psychological Evaluations for the Courts: A Handbook for Mental Health Professionals and Lawyers

by Gary B. Melton

Some of this difference was due to technical legal findings. For instance, courts often upheld findings that the mental disorder could not have been caused by an “accident,” or that the mental disorder was not an “injury” within the statutory meaning. But at bottom the hostility to compensation for mental injury reflected inherent distrust of such claims, including a fear of malingering,47 and concern over problems associated with objectively linking employment with mental injuries whose etiology and course is uncertain or unknown.48 In more recent times, compensation for mental injury has become much more common.49 One commentator has noted that workers’ compensation cases today involve mental disorders of “almost every conceivable kind of neurotic, psychotic, psychosomatic, depressive, or hysterical symptom, functional overlay, or personality disorder.”50 Nonetheless, the success of a modern mental