Three practitioners said PTSD. The independent panel said otherwise - and for CTP insurers, that distinction changes everything.
In a decision handed down on April 7, 2026, a Personal Injury Commission Review Panel revoked an earlier medical assessment and found that claimant Akon Chol's psychiatric injury from a March 30, 2023 motor vehicle accident amounted to adjustment disorder with depressed mood - not post-traumatic stress disorder. Under the Motor Accident Injuries Act 2017, that diagnosis is a threshold injury by definition, capping statutory benefits and blocking any claim for damages.
The case turned on a deceptively simple question: did the accident meet the bar for a PTSD diagnosis under the DSM-5-TR?
Ms Chol was stationary at traffic lights on the Great Western Highway when the lights turned green and she began turning left. A vehicle from the rightmost lane merged into hers and struck the right side of her car. She reported neck and lumbar spine pain and later claimed PTSD.
Her GP, Dr Morgan Mo, diagnosed PTSD. So did Dr Eric Lim. Clinical psychologist Carl Nielsen went further, setting out the DSM-5-TR criteria and noting "a deterioration in her mental state characterised by repeated disturbing and unwanted memories pertaining to the MVA." Three professionals, one diagnosis.
The original Medical Assessor, Matthew Jones, disagreed entirely. He found no psychiatric disorder caused by the first accident, calling the mechanism relatively minor and insufficient to meet Criterion A - the DSM-5-TR requirement that a person be exposed to actual or threatened death or serious injury. He pointed instead to a second, more severe accident on October 26, 2024, when a truck ran into the back of Ms Chol's stationary vehicle and pushed it into oncoming traffic.
The Review Panel — Member Jeremy Lum and Medical Assessors Christopher Canaris and Himanshu Singh — landed somewhere in between. After re-examining Ms Chol, they agreed that neither accident cleared the Criterion A bar. Nielsen's reasoning - that the criterion was met because Ms Chol "was the driver involved in an MVA where she sustained serious injuries" - was found insufficient.
The Panel did recognise a psychiatric condition. Ms Chol's current presentation was consistent with persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia) with anxious distress, but the Panel attributed that to the second accident. The first accident, they found, produced an adjustment disorder with depressed mood — an understandable response to pain and the loss of income that followed her physical injuries.
Clause 5.12 of the Motor Accident Guidelines spells out the consequence: where symptoms do not meet the criteria for a recognised psychiatric illness - with the exception of acute stress disorder and adjustment disorder - the injury is considered threshold. Because the accident predated 1 April 2023, the former "minor injury" framework and a 26-week benefit cap applied.
For insurers managing CTP psychiatric claims, the takeaway is pointed. Treating practitioner diagnoses carry weight, but the Commission will look for rigorous, criterion-by-criterion compliance with the DSM-5-TR. And where multiple accidents muddy the waters, how causation is split between events can be the difference between a threshold and non-threshold outcome.
