ABSTRACT
In this workers’ compensation case, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld a ruling by the workers’ compensation board that James Carter, a machine operator who worked on assembly line production at General Motors, was entitled to disability compensation because of psychosis caused by stress at his job. Signicantly, Mr. Carter was under only the ordinary pressures of a machine worker, but suered from an underlying personality disorder and a predisposition to the development of schizophrenia that made him more vulnerable to those pressures. us, in the words of the compensation board that had granted compensation, the work pressures were the “straws that broke the camel’s back.”
