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McCormack v. Carmen Schell Construction Co.6/25/2002
ce.
Point I is denied.
Point II: Hospitalization at Charter -- Causation
Schell's second point on appeal challenges the Commission's award to Mr. McCormack of additional medical expenses for his hospitalization at Charter Hospital. Schell alleges that an unfavorable civil jury verdict not the electrical shock led to his Charter hospitalization and the attendant medical costs.
Missouri's Workers' Compensation Law compensates a worker for a mental condition if it is shown to have been directly and proximately caused by the accident. Chatmon, 55 S.W.3d at 456. Schell maintains that Mr. McCormack failed to meet his burden of proof in showing that the mental condition for which he received treatment at Charter Hospital was directly and proximately caused by the electrical shock accident rather than by the results of his civil trial.
On June 14, 1999, Mr. McCormack arrived for an appointment at Dr. Abrams' office in what Dr. Abrams described as a "highly agitated and disturbed" condition. Dr. Abrams testified with regard to this visit as follows:
e told me that he was tired of feeling bad. He didn't have any strength left; his nightmares were getting worse; he got really confused; and he had very violent dreams, which he couldn't get rid of. And at that point he states he had thoughts about killing himself. And sometimes he didn't have the strength to go on living. He felt like a prisoner in his own house. And he felt like he was being watched a followed. He considered shooting himself with a shotgun.
In response, Dr. Abrams, after consulting Dr. Joyce Tobiasen, Mr. McCormack's psychologist, and with the consent of Mr. McCormack's wife, arranged for Mr. McCormack's immediate hospitalization at Charter Hospital for psychiatric therapy.
The ALJ's findings, as adopted by the Commission, concerning Mr. McCormack's treatment at Charter are as follows:
The hospitalization at Charter Hospital is causally related to Claimant's electrical shock injury. [Schell] argued that this medical care was necessitated by the stress from [Mr. McCormack]'s civil case. It was apparent that [Mr. McCormack]'s civil case was a stressor in his life but it is equally apparent that it was not the sole cause of his breakdown. The underlying component of his breakdown, which necessitated his hospitalization at Charter, was the combination of his post-traumatic stress disorder, coupled with his depression. These illnesses were the direct result of his electric shock injury as determined by his treating physicians.
We first note that a large portion of Schell's argument appears to be directed toward the causation of Mr. McCormack's mental condition and physiological symptoms overall, which are discussed in Point I. The Commission's findings that Mr. McCormack's mental condition was caused by the electrical shock is not against the weight of the evidence. Schell's second point on appeal actually focuses on Mr. McCormack's hospitalization at Charter Hospital, so we limit our discussion to that issue.
Schell again insists that Commissioner Wrigley's dissenting opinion be adopted on the issue of additional medical costs for the Charter hospitalization. In support of its argument that the Commission's findings are against the weight of the evidence because Mr. McCormack's mental condition resulted from his civil trial, Schell again isolates small portions of the record. For example, Schell cites to parts of the testimony of Dr. Chris D. Fevurly, who evaluated Mr. McCormack for the second time on May 31, 2000. Dr. Fevurly opined that there was no causal relationship between Mr. McCormack's "symptom complex" and
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