The Federal Circuit Court That Doesn’t Think Mental Illness Is Real

One man’s heroic actions in the face of a dangerous refinery fire left him with PTSD. A Southern federal court has opted to leave workers like him behind.

A federal appeals court in Texas ruled earlier this week that OSHA can’t require companies to document work-related mental illnesses, a significant new limitation on the flagship federal workplace-safety statute.

“However commendable OSHA’s desire to improve mental health in the workplace, like all agencies, OSHA’s authority to regulate toward that end is constrained by the limits of power Congress delegated to the agency,” Judge Cory Wilson concluded in a case involving a Exxon Mobil employee who developed PTSD after a 2021 fire at a Houston-area refinery.

“OSHA’s reading of [the statute] to encompass the power to regulate workplace mental illnesses may be plausible,” he continued. “But the best reading of the statute is narrower: that ‘illnesses,’ as used there, refers to physical, and not mental, work-related ailments and conditions.”

This pseudo-Cartesian view of the mind-body question is unusual, to say the least. Modern medicine no longer views physical and mental illnesses as completely different phenomena, and there is no persuasive evidence that Congress meant to adopt this division either. Exxon Mobil v. OSHA is a testament to how powerful companies and conservative judges can work together to drain laws enacted by elected representatives of their potency and protection.

The case springs from the company’s treatment of an unnamed worker whom the court calls Employee 2. (Since he is not a party to the case, his name was kept redacted for privacy reasons.) The employee was a longtime technician at Exxon’s Baytown refinery, which is located just outside Houston to the east. One portion of the refinery is dedicated to extracting sulfur from naphtha—a high-octane fuel precursor—using hydrogen.

Employee 2 was working nearby when disaster struck on December 3, 2021: A pipe ruptured during repairs and ignited a massive fire at the facility, sending flames as high as 150 feet into the air, according to court records. He rushed to the afflicted part of the refinery and made contact with firefighters on the scene, who were struggling to close key valves to prevent the fire from spreading. Though he was not trained as a firefighter, Employee 2 still offered to assist them in locating the valves inside the burning building. The firefighters provided him with an extra set of their own gear and he followed them into a hellish inferno.

“The unit was dark because the power was ‘knocked out,’ and flames were ‘streaking across the alleyway,’” an OSHA administrative judge later recounted, citing testimony. “They reached the P609 hydrogen outlet valve, which was open and feeding the fire. Employee 2 pointed to........

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