Telecommuting teacher denied benefits over stress-related stroke

An appeals court in New York on Thursday denied workers compensation benefits to a teacher and grant writer who was working from home when she suffered a stroke she claimed was caused by work stress precipitated by a phone call with her boss.

A physician treating the woman testified that “the claimant’s stroke ‘was caused by the excessive stress and emotional trauma she has had to endure while working for the (employer),’ all of which caused her blood pressure to rise to ‘a crisis stage,’” according to CV-23-2329, filed in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.

The physician “also acknowledged… that claimant had multiple recognized risk factors for a stroke, including longstanding hypertension, hyperlipidemia and diabetes, as well as a history of a pack-a-day cigarette usage,” the ruling states.

The appeals court, in affirming earlier rulings that denied her workers compensation benefits, wrote that “with respect to claimant’s assertion that the stress resulting from the April 2022 incident exacerbated her preexisting psychological conditions, claimant again was required to demonstrate a causal relationship between her employment and the asserted injury and, further, ‘that the stress that caused the claimed psychological injury was greater than that which other similarly situated workers experienced in the normal work environment,’” in accordance with case law.

The court wrote that although the workers compensation law judge “credited claimant’s account of the… incident and deemed the encounter between claimant and her school principal to be confrontational, such a disagreement was not ‘an unusual, unexpected or extraordinary’ event so as to constitute a workplace accident.”