What Is Considered an Emotional Injury?
Personal injury cases cover a fairly wide range of situations where someone experiences harm, injury, or loss due to the actions or negligence of another. Car accidents, medical malpractice, dog bites, and slip-and-fall incidents, for example, can significantly impact your health and well-being. In most cases, the resulting injuries and damages are easy to see—for example, a broken leg, stitched-up dog bite, or damaged car—but many people don’t realize that emotional injury or harm can have an equally pronounced effect on your quality of life and ability to function normally.
What is considered an emotional injury, and can you seek financial compensation for it in a personal injury case? Personal injury attorneys, including the team at Warren Allen LLP, work with many clients who have suffered emotional injury due to traumatic events or negligent actions. Since emotional injury can be more complicated to prove and assess for damages, it’s important to discuss this issue with an expert if you want to seek financial compensation.
To help you better understand the different types of emotional injury you could experience, we’ve put together some information about general symptoms you might notice, different types of emotional injury, and the legal considerations involved in recognizing, proving, and compensating for such injury.
Common Symptoms of Emotional Injury
First, it’s important to recognize the signs that you might have experienced emotional injury due to a traumatic event or negligence. Depending on the incident, you might exhibit changes in cognition (confusion, memory problems, intrusive thoughts), mood (depression, anxiety, fear, emotional numbness), behavior (social withdrawal, avoidance of certain places or triggers), and even physiology (insomnia, loss of appetite, fatigue, headaches).
Types of Emotional Injury
Although the symptoms for different types of emotional injury might overlap, and you might suffer from more than one concurrently, there are subtle distinctions described below that a mental health expert might use to diagnose you.
Anxiety
One common response to a traumatic event or to prolonged stress is anxiety, including generalized anxiety disorder. Although everyone worries from time to time, anxiety is more excessive, persistent, and difficult to control than everyday worry and can be characterized by panic attacks, phobias, sleep disturbances, and difficulty concentrating or making decisions.
Anxiety might become severe enough to interfere with daily living, including hampering interpersonal relationships and job performance. Left untreated, anxiety can become chronic and dramatically reduce quality of life.
Depression
Similar to anxiety, depression is more intense and long-lasting than normal the sadness everyone experiences occasionally. Someone suffering from depression might notice sleeplessness or excessive fatigue, loss of appetite or interest in hobbies and activities, and feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness, among other things. As with anxiety, depression should be treated with the help of a health professional.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Often associated with military veterans, PTSD can affect anyone who has experienced or witnessed a particularly traumatic incident. An individual suffering from PTSD might have flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive memories of the actual incident.
However, even without these symptoms, a person could become hypervigilant or develop heightened startle responses and avoid triggers or reminders of the trauma. Negative changes in mood and cognitive functioning are also common. Most people with PTSD require long-term, professional treatment.
Loss of Enjoyment of Life
If your ability to find joy and take pleasure in your relationships, hobbies, or daily activities is diminished or reduced after experiencing a traumatic event, you might be suffering from the emotional injury known as the loss of enjoyment of life. Sometimes, loss of enjoyment of life can also occur due to physical injuries that limit your ability to work or participate in activities you formerly enjoyed.
Grief and Bereavement
Families will always experience grief when a loved one dies. However, in cases of wrongful death due to negligence, such as medical malpractice or a traumatic accident, that grief can become deeper and more prolonged than it would be otherwise, and it might qualify as emotional injury.
Emotional Distress
A more generalized term for emotional injury, emotional distress covers a variety of mental suffering that can occur due to a traumatic experience, such as severe embarrassment or humiliation, indignity, or feeling helpless.
Emotional Injury in Personal Injury Law
Because emotional injury and mental suffering can be difficult to tie directly to financial loss (as opposed to the cost of repairing a car, for example), in personal injury law, they are considered non-economic damages.
To pursue a legal claim for emotional injury, you must be able to document or provide proof of the emotional injury and link it directly to the defendant’s actions or negligence. To prove an emotional injury exists and establish its severity, courts generally accept:
- Medical records, such as diagnoses and notes from licensed health professionals
- Expert testimony from mental health professionals like psychiatrists and psychologists, who can speak to the extent and causality of the emotional injury
- Personal testimony where you, your friends, family members, and colleagues describe your suffering
- Documentation of life changes that detail how your emotional injury has negatively affected your work, hobbies, and relationships
When assessing and awarding damages for emotional injury, courts will usually take into account the severity and duration of symptoms; any need for ongoing mental health treatment or medication; physical symptoms, if they exist; and the negative effects on the plaintiff’s daily life, work, and relationships. Some jurisdictions set limits on the amount of non-economic damages that can be awarded, especially if there are no accompanying physical symptoms, which could affect your case.
Consult with Warren Allen About Your Emotional Injury
Although emotional injury is inherently subjective, and this can sometimes make it more difficult to prove in court, pain and suffering is a legitimate and important factor in many personal injury cases. If you are experiencing symptoms of anxiety, depression, PTSD, loss of enjoyment of life, grief and bereavement, or emotional distress after going through a traumatic event due to someone else’s actions, it’s essential to speak with qualified personal injury attorneys about the potential for seeking financial compensation through a personal injury case. The attorneys at Warren Allen LLP have years of experience in personal injury law and can offer expert legal advice. Don’t suffer in silence. Contact us to get the help you need today.