Personal Injury Non-Economic Damages Claims: Emotional Distress
Emotional distress in a personal injury accident is a real problem for many people. If you’ve suffered trauma, emotional distress can follow you long after the immediate dangers have passed. Unfortunately, unlike most physical injuries that heal or at least stabilize over time, emotional distress can spiral from manageable to out of control faster than you may think.
Emotional Distress in Personal Injury
Emotional distress damages in personal injury refers to any mental suffering that you experience after an accident. You may feel anything from fear to anxiety to depression. You may develop post-traumatic stress disorder, which can cause you to relive the accident again and again.
If the personal injury occurred because of another party’s negligence, such as a driver texting on the road, these feelings can represent a profound disruption in your life. You may find it difficult to keep up with your daily routines, enjoy activities you once loved, or maintain healthy relationships with the most important people in your life.
Emotional distress does not impact every accident victim, and the symptoms can range from barely there to debilitating. If you were involved in a personal injury or you’re thinking about filing a personal injury claim, the most crucial thing you can do is recognize the emotional and mental results of the accident. Trying to push these feelings away or assume that they’ll disappear eventually can cause you to miss an important part of the claims process.
The Impact Rule: Understanding the Laws on Emotional Distress
Not everyone realizes that they can claim emotional as well as physical damages in a personal injury claim. When you file for emotional distress, you’re filing for more than just the direct cost of mental health care, like psychiatric visits and therapist co-pays. However, in Florida, trying to qualify someone’s distress isn’t easy to do, particularly when mental anguish is harder to see and prove than physical injury.
The most important legal precedent is Florida’s Impact Rule, which is essentially a way to limit how much you attempt to claim from the incident. This rule heavily correlates emotional injuries to physical injuries. In other words, you’ll need to prove that you sustained physical trauma before you can state that you’ve suffered from emotional distress.
However, there are some exceptions to this rule, and they include breach of confidentiality, such as a psychologist sharing your secrets, the ingestion of contaminated food and beverages, or the witnessing of catastrophic death or injury.
So, let’s say that your father falls due to a commercial property’s poorly lit stairwell and you witness the fall. Your father sustains internal bleeding, landing him in the hospital for more than a month. While you were not physically injured yourself, you find it hard to go into any unlit areas for fear of falling. You may find that you relive his accident constantly, prompting new fears for your family and friends. This may entitle you to emotional damages for your personal injury.
Or if you find a dead mouse in your salad at a restaurant. Even if you find the mouse before you ingest it, the experience may traumatize you or even give you an eating disorder after the event. It’s important to note that just like physical injury, every person reacts to different events in their own way. Just like falling down a staircase may break a bone for one person and only result in a bruise from another person, emotional distress can play out very differently for different people. If you don’t get a handle on the emotional distress of an accident or you don’t get the support you need from it, the long-term consequences may be far more severe than you anticipated.
Physical Manifestations of Emotional Distress
Emotional distress can cause physical injuries, particularly for those who aren’t dealing with the problem. You may suffer from unexplained stomach problems or headaches. You may find yourself suffering from insomnia or high blood pressure. These after-effects can be used to help strengthen your case should you choose to claim emotional damages. So, while the personal injury may not have explicitly caused these issues, the physical manifestations of stress can support that you’re suffering from real mental pain.
What to Expect from an Emotional Distress Case
Whether you develop depression or migraine headaches, emotional distress cases can provide financial compensation for a loss of enjoyment. Again, in Florida, this is not always a straightforward equation, with different legal professionals taking very different lenses on the same situation.
If you want to ensure you get the support you need during a personal injury case, it helps to work with a Florida personal injury lawyer who can tell you how the courts function in different types of cases. An experienced law firm may not be able to predict the future, but they can tell you how similar cases have played out, which can give you an idea of whether to pursue your claims and how much to file for.
How to Prove Emotional Distress
You may wonder how someone can prove emotional distress. If you do choose to pursue this legal pathway, you’ll need to provide evidence of your conditions, which may include testimony from mental health professionals or other medical records. You may need to submit to a psychological evaluation for conditions to qualify and quantify the mental anguish suffered on account of the accident. If you don’t have the proper documentation, it can be difficult for a decision-maker to understand what they’re really up against.
You can also give your own testimony or have a loved one provide testimony during a Florida personal injury case. This can help you fill in the details of the story, which can help a judge, jury, or arbitrator understand the full context of the injury. Personal injury is largely caused by negligence, meaning that someone made a careless mistake that caused the impact. For example, the cashier of a chain store who was supposed to flip on the lights to the stairwell simply forgot to check this task off their list. In this case, the blame might be distributed between the store clerk, the store manager, the franchise owner of the chain store, and the parent company of the chain store. When it comes to paying out for emotional damages, all of these factors will be taken into consideration.
However, there are certain cases where you can prove that there was an intent to injure, which can provide a new facet to the case. For example, let’s say that you’ve been fighting with your neighbor over their aggressive dog. If the dog bites you because the neighbor failed to tie it up, you and your spouse might provide testimony about how the fights have escalated over the years, potentially proving that the neighbor intended to hurt you by failing to secure their dog to its leash or confine it to the yard. This intent, knowing that your neighbor actively wanted you to suffer from the physical injury, can cause the courts to look differently on the situation, ensuring that your emotional distress is seen and heard and improving your odds of receiving emotional distress damages.
Personal Injury Lawyers and Emotional Distress
A personal injury lawyer can do more than track down doctor’s testimonies and prepare legal briefs. Instead of having to navigate a complex legal system, particularly when it pertains to sometimes invisible injuries, you can put the burden on a compassionate lawyer who can help you understand how your case will be seen by the courts so you can make a smart decision about your future. Whether you choose to pursue your emotional distress claims or not, it helps to have all the facts before you make a choice you’ll regret.
Why Call Shapiro Law Group, P.A.
If you’re overwhelmed right now and seeking emotional distress damages, calling Shapiro Law Group, P.A. is one of the best things that you can do to take control. Here, we empower our clients to face up to their emotional and physical trauma, but above all else, we fight for them to get the compensation they need to get their lives back on track. If you’re suffering the emotional consequences of a personal injury and you want to learn more about recourse, contact us today and tell us your story.
