NY lawmakers squash mental stress law

Workers in New York who want to file mental injury workers compensation claims for “extraordinary” work stress have just over three months to do so after Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday signed a bill limiting benefits to only first responders under certain conditions.

S.B. 775 effectively reverses a law Ms. Hochul signed in December 2024 by removing language that applied the provision for mental injury compensation and treatment to all “workers” and replaced it with “police officer or firefighter… or emergency medical technician, paramedic, or other person certified to provide medical care in emergencies, or emergency dispatcher.”

The first responder would need to connect the mental injury to a “work-related emergency,” according to the new law, which will go into effect June 4, according to a spokeswoman in the governor’s office.

The bill also adds a language prohibiting the New York Workers’ Compensation Board from disallowing a mental injury claim based on the finding that the stress was not greater than normal when: the claim is for post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder or major depressive disorder; the condition resulted from work-related stress; the condition was diagnosed using criteria in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in effect on the accident date; and the worker proves that the condition arose out of extraordinary work-related stress attributable to a distinct work-related event and that it arose out of employment and in the course of employment.