The Impact of Emotional Distress on Your Personal Injury Claim
Personal injuries can have significant physical and financial impacts on accident victims. Accident victims can also suffer from lasting psychological and emotional impacts as well. Understanding how emotional distress can affect a personal injury claim can help you identify and document the full extent of your losses
Keep reading below to learn how to navigate the complexities of emotional distress in personal injury claims.
What Is Emotional Distress?
Emotional distress is the mental suffering and other psychological responses to an accident or other event. Emotional distress is often lumped into the larger category of pain and suffering damages.
Possible symptoms or effects of emotional distress may include:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Difficulty performing everyday activities
- Fear
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
Knowing how to identify emotional distress is often the first step. Documenting these effects may help support a claim for mental anguish or other applicable damages.
How Can Emotional Distress Affect Your Daily Life?
Emotional distress after an accident can affect more than a person’s mood. Psychological effects may interfere with work, relationships, sleep, hobbies, and everyday activities.
Someone may experience difficulty concentrating, changes in sleep, fear of driving, social withdrawal, or problems returning to activities they enjoyed before the injury. The nature, duration, and severity of these effects can be relevant when evaluating mental anguish damages in a personal injury claim.
What Compensation Can You Recover for Emotional Distress?
Victims who suffer from emotional distress may experience both economic and non-economic damages. Accident victims may be entitled to recover compensation for all those damages.
Economic damages commonly associated with emotional distress include:
- Therapy costs
- Mental health counseling
- Prescription or over-the-counter medication
- Other medical treatment expenses
Non-economic damages are more subjective because they do not have a direct financial value. Evidence of the nature, duration, and severity of a person’s mental anguish can be important when establishing these damages.
How Do I Prove Emotional Distress?
Recovering mental anguish damages requires evidence supporting the existence and extent of the emotional harm. Texas courts consider evidence of the nature, duration, and severity of the mental anguish, including whether it caused a substantial disruption in daily life or a high degree of mental pain and distress.
Some common types of evidence used to prove emotional distress include:
- Medical records
- “Day in the life” journals
- Expert testimony
- Testimony from friends or family members
- Bills, receipts, and other financial proof
Evidence can help establish the nature, duration, and severity of the emotional effects you experienced.
After your accident, you want to gather and preserve as much evidence as possible to prove your claim. Make sure that you save all bills, receipts, and other documentation associated with your injury. Keep detailed notes and records about how your daily life has been affected by your injury. Also, document all the emotional symptoms that you are experiencing.
Contact the Texas Personal Injury Attorneys at The Law Firm of Alton C. Todd Personal Injury Lawyers for help today
While emotional distress may be intangible, the effects can be just as real as your physical injuries. Damages for emotional distress can often make up a substantial part of your total claim. You deserve to be fairly compensated for all your physical and emotional suffering.
An experienced Galveston personal injury lawyer can evaluate how emotional distress may affect the damages sought in your claim. The Law Firm of Alton C. Todd Personal Injury Lawyers has 58 years of combined legal experience representing accident and injury victims.
Please contact an experienced personal injury lawyer at The Law Firm of Alton C. Todd Personal Injury Lawyers to get a free initial consultation today. We have offices in Friendswood and Galveston, Texas:
The Law Firm of Alton C. Todd Personal Injury Lawyers – Galveston Office
2101 Mechanic St. Suite 253
Galveston, TX 77550
(409) 207-9299
The Law Firm of Alton C. Todd Personal Injury Lawyers – Friendswood Office
312 S. Friendswood Dr.
Friendswood, TX 77546
281-992-8633
