If you are ever the victim of an auto accident, it is your right to be compensated for the damages you've suffered. This compensation should be paid by the person who caused the accident, their insurer, or, in some cases, your insurer.
You can also claim damages for any injuries you suffer, income you fail to earn due to the accident, and property damages. And you may have heard that claiming compensation for emotional distress is possible.
But can you sue for emotional distress after a car accident? We explore that in this article, along with what classifies as emotional distress, how to deal with it, and more.
What exactly is emotional distress after a car accident, and how can you identify it? It presents itself in different classes. Some of them are:
After an accident, you may feel scared to drive, constantly worrying that another accident might happen. This anxiety could get so bad that you find it difficult to concentrate and stop driving altogether.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that could affect people who have been in very stressful, scary, and traumatic situations. Some car accidents may be more severe than others, so the levels of PTSD may vary.
Frequent and sudden mood swings may also be evidence of emotional distress after a car accident. These mood swings may be driven by a proneness to irritability, anger, sadness, and despair.
Victims of traumatic accidents may experience significant trouble sleeping or see their sleeping patterns significantly disrupted. In a few cases, victims may also experience hypersomnia – a change to their sleeping habits that causes them to begin to sleep too much.
Their sleeping patterns may also be affected by nightmares typically driven by fear or anxiety.
If, after an accident, certain situations or thoughts trigger periods of intense fear and anxiety (or panic attacks), that would be classed as emotional distress. These periods may be evidenced by heart palpitations, difficulty breathing, and general confusion.
Some common symptoms of car accident emotional distress are:
These symptoms in isolation may not be sufficient evidence. However, if you begin to experience them more frequently after your involvement in an accident, they may be signs of emotional distress.
To begin with, it is essential to point out that any lawsuit for emotional distress will be under a class of law called torts, which deal with the personal injury or harm that one person sustains as a result of another person's actions or oversights. For a long time, emotional distress could only be claimed as damages for certain torts, like battery, assault, and physical injury or the threat of it.
However, courts eventually began to recognize emotional distress as sufficient cause for an action, allowing claimants to sue for only emotional distress. Today, there are two types of emotional distress you can sue for. They are:
This will be your claim if you believe a person's action or series of actions was carried out deliberately to cause you emotional distress. To successfully prove this, you will need to prove the following elements:
Regarding the first element, the defendant's conduct must be considered extreme and outrageous. Courts approach the question of whether an act is extreme and outrageous on a case-by-case basis, but there is a consensus that the conduct must go beyond the bounds of decency tolerated by decent society.
In Hogan v. Forsyth Country Club Co., 79 N.C. App. 483, 340 S.E.2d 116 (N.C. Ct. App. 1986), the court established that mere insults, indignities, and threats would not be deemed extreme and outrageous conduct in a working relationship. However, the courts will consider factors like the nature of the relationship between the parties in each case.
To prove intentional or reckless conduct, you’ll have to show that the defendant either committed the action to intentionally cause emotional distress or with knowledge that their actions had a high probability of causing emotional distress. This may be difficult to establish, but you should be fine with skilled legal representation.
Finally, you must show that the conduct caused severe emotional distress to you. According to Knierim v. Izzo, 22 Ill. 2d 73, 174 N.E.2d 157 (Ill. 1961), not all emotional upset will meet the severe emotional distress requirement to guarantee a suit's success.
In Harris v. Jones, 281 Md. 560, 380 A.2d 611 (Md. 1977), a court held that feeling shaken up or ashamed after an incident would not constitute severe emotional distress.
And in Fletcher v. Western National Life Ins. Co., 10 Cal.App.3d 376, 89 Cal. Rptr. 78 (Cal. Ct. App. 1970), severe emotional distress was described as distress of such quality that no reasonable person in civilized society should be expected to endure it.
You may also suffer emotional distress even when the defendant does not intend to or disregards the likelihood of harm resulting from their actions. For such actions, your claim will be a negligent infliction of emotional distress.
To prove negligence, you must first show the following:
To show that you have indeed suffered severe emotional distress, some states require that the emotional distress must be established with proof of physical symptoms of trauma.
The Virginia Supreme Court, for instance, in Hughes v. Moore, 214 Va. 27, 197 S.E.2d 214 (Va. 1973), established that for there to be successful recovery for emotional disturbance arising out of negligent conduct, some sort of physical injury must result from the emotional disturbance.
In the instant case, the plaintiff suffered nervous shock from witnessing an accident, and she could not breastfeed her three-month-old baby.
As a result, her bust began to diminish, and she experienced her menstrual period irregularly. The court held that she had suffered physical injury from the emotional disturbance.
Finally, you must prove to the court that the defendant's negligent conduct was closely tied to your injury for an action to succeed. Different states adopt different standards to prove this element.
Most states, like North Carolina and Oregon, employ the foreseeability standard. Under this rule, the emotional distress caused to the plaintiff must have been reasonably foreseeable by the defendant.
One of the leading cases on foreseeability as a standard for liability in actions for negligent infliction of emotional distress is Dillon v. Legg, 68 Cal.2d 728, 69 Cal. Rptr. 72, 441 P.2d 912 (Cal. 1968). Here, the California Supreme Court established that foreseeability of risk is of primary importance in establishing the element of duty and that foreseeable risk may entail physical impact and emotional injury.
Other states, like New York, employ the zone of danger standard. Under this rule, a plaintiff must show that they were at risk of injury or death due to the plaintiff's negligence or were in the "zone of danger."
This rule often applies to bystanders in states that allow it. It allows relatives of a victim to get relief for their emotional distress if they were aware of the death or serious injury of the victim when the action happened. It is mainly used to show emotional distress for family members of accident victims.
In Rickey v. Chicago Transit Authority, 98 Ill. 2d 546, 457 N.E.2d 1 (Ill. 1983), the Supreme Court of Illinois established that for a bystander to claim negligent infliction of emotional distress, they must show that they were in the zone of physical danger, they reasonably feared for their own safety, and they suffered bodily injury or illness from the emotional distress caused by the defendant's negligence.
Few states, like Florida and Georgia, apply the impact standard. Here, the defendant's actions must have caused physical harm to the plaintiff, no matter how little, for an action to be successful.
In International Ocean Tel. Co. v. Saunders, 14 So. 148, 32 Fla. 434, the Florida Supreme Court decided that a man could not claim damages for emotional distress from a telegraph company that was 60 hours late to deliver a message telling him his wife was dying. The court thought that pain of mind and injury to feelings and affection were impossible to sue without injury.
Proving emotional distress could be an uphill task since there isn't always something concrete to rely on. Providing the appropriate evidence may also be more challenging since each case is considered individually, so what may suffice as evidence for one case may not suffice in another.
However, it is crucial to remember that if you intend to sue for emotional distress, you must gather as much documentary evidence as possible. Hence, once you experience any symptoms, see a doctor.
A medical diagnosis or prescription that confirms emotional distress will be helpful to prove it. Other ways that you may be able to demonstrate this include:
Since the court will have to deal with intangible feelings for most emotional distress, its method for quantifying damages is slightly different from the traditional method.
The most common method for quantifying emotional distress is the multiplier method. Here, all the economic damages, like medical treatment costs and loss of wages, are first added up. Then, the pain and suffering the victim experienced due to the trauma is estimated and assigned a numerical value (usually from 1.5 to 5) after considering the severity, duration, causation, and other important factors.
The jury then multiplies the economic damages by the agreed multiplies to award damages. So, if an accident victim incurs $25,000 in economic damages but the emotional distress suffered is not too severe or did not last too long, they may be assigned a multiplier of 2, bringing their total damages to $50,000.
Another standard method juries use is the per diem method, which assigns a daily value to the injury suffered and estimates the number of days that the victim will suffer physical or emotional pain due to the injury. The amount is then multiplied by the number of days to give a total.
The trauma resulting from a severe car accident may be challenging to deal with. Still, it is crucial to do so if you will get better. Here are a few tips on how you can healthily work through it:
The legalities of securing compensation for economic damages are complicated, and many states embrace slight variances in how they treat cases like these. Hence, to succeed in a claim for emotional distress, you must have legal support from a proven legal professional who is also well-versed in your state's legal requirements.
These legal professionals could take the bulk of the work off your hands by deciding how to best sue for emotional distress, given the circumstances of an accident. They can also secure all the proof you need to successfully file a lawsuit, negotiate with an insurance company where necessary, and argue your case such that a jury awards the highest possible compensation to you.
At The Accident Helpers, we have a network of the best car accident lawyers nationwide, and we will connect you to one in your locality for free. All you have to do is contact us and tell us the details of your accident. We will immediately help you secure a lawyer who's best positioned to take on your case.
Remember, our services are completely free, so contact us today!