정신질환의 ‘업무상’ 재해 인정 기준: 기존 정신질환 악화의 업무기인성

Recently, Korean Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act (hereinafter ‘IACIA’) has prepared a legislative alternative plan by regulating new work-related mental disorders such as an adjustment disorder. However, the cause of psychological load (stress) is complicated, and the symptom and progress of mental illness are also diverse. Therefore, the measures or decisions of Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service and judgments of the Court with regard to the specific cases are not easy. The paper found key issues in the recent cases as below, and pondered the criteria to these questions. First, what are the grounds of legal principles that various psychiatric illness can be recognized as work-related accidents in IACIA? Furthermore, depending on the nature of mental disorders, a wide range of progresses such as occurrence, relapse and repeated maintaining condition of disease are revealed. In this case, how do we acknowledge the start of disease, which means when to occur work-related accidents in IACIA? In particular, when someone has own existing mental disorder, what are the criteria to determine the start of work-related disease? Second, how to determine the degree of relations with duty’s underlying cause that imposes psychological burden? Particularly, the ‘aggravation’ of work-related mental disorder is not easy medically to predict the progress as well. Thus the Court also has difficulty in concluding whether it is related to the ‘relapse’ of past disease or to the ‘radical aggravation’ of existing disease. Based on the above, this paper examined whether mental illness exists or not as legal requirements of work-related accidents, more specifically, the judgements related to existing disease. In addition, in the case of when the existing mental illnesses get worse, this paper also investigated the problems with the guideline judgements of Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service, contents of judgement of Workers’ Compensation Insurance Eligibility Review Commission, and the recent decisions of the Court.