Can You Sue for Emotional Injury After an Accident?

Examples of Emotional Injury After an Accident

So, when can you sue for emotional injury? Your injury needs to fit into what the law and medical professionals view as emotional distress for you to have a legitimate emotional injury claim. For legal purposes, this is measured from exhibited symptoms. They include:

• Feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, helpless, and even suicidal
• Withdrawal from activities, people, and things you once liked
• Insomnia or inability to get out of bed
• Low energy and unexplained fatigue that doesn’t ease with rest
• Unexplainable guilt, embarrassment, unusual anger, torment, and irritability
• Flashbacks, PTSD, anxiety, depression, fearfulness, stress, and nightmares

Whenever you experience the above symptoms after an accident, seek medical assistance. Your doctor will likely refer you to a mental health provider who can diagnose you and discuss treatment options.

In Illinois, there are two types of claims you can file for emotional distress.

Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress

You can file this claim if someone else’s intentional actions cause you to develop an emotional injury.

Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress

You may have grounds to sue for emotional injury if the negligent actions of another party cause you to develop emotional distress. While there is no intent to harm you, you can still hold the negligent party liable and seek compensation.

What Elements Need to Be Proven to Have a Successful Emotional Injury Lawsuit?

You must prove four elements to have a successful emotional injury lawsuit. These are:

Duty of Care

The person you are suing must owe you a duty of care. For example, a driver has a legal duty to prevent accidents by following all the traffic rules and ensuring his or her vehicle is in good condition before operating it on Illinois roadways. An emotional injury lawsuit requires you to prove that the defendant owed you a duty of care. You can show that the driver had a legal duty to drive safely to avoid injuring others by citing relevant traffic laws.

Breach of Duty

After showcasing that a duty was owed, you need to show that the defendant breached this duty through the driver’s actions. For example, a driver is expected to service his or her car and ensure its road-worthiness. If the driver fails to do so and does not notice the vehicle has a faulty braking system, the driver has breached the duty of care owed to you and other road users.

Causation

You must prove that it’s the defendant’s breached duty that caused your injury. In the above example, you can prove causation by linking failed brakes to negligence on the driver’s part. You can then link the failed brakes to the accident that caused your injuries.

Damages

The premise of personal injury compensation claims, including emotional injury claims, is ‘making one whole’. Making one whole means ensuring that an accident victim gets compensated for the losses the victim has suffered because of another party’s actions. Ideally, the damages paid should put a person’s life back to where it was or close to what it was before the accident happened.

In emotional injury cases, you need to prove that you suffered damages due to the defendant’s breach. You must establish what these damages are and determine their value. These damages often include medical bills, loss of income, pain and suffering, and a lowered quality of life.

Challenges in Suing for Emotional Injury

While emotional distress cases without physical injuries might be slightly more difficult to prove, do not dismiss a valid claim just because you failed to speak with a personal injury lawyer in Illinois. Your lawyer will help you overcome challenges when suing for emotional injuries. These challenges include:

Establishing a Direct Link Between the Accident and Emotional Injuries

Proving the existence of a duty of care and breach of that duty can be fairly straightforward. However, proving causation has its limits.

Symptoms of emotional distress are varied and can be attributed to numerous factors. For instance, insomnia, fatigue, stress, and loss of appetite can stem from other health complications or pre-existing factors at work, school, and relationships. So, tying them to a neglected duty to prove causation can be an uphill task.

Delayed Symptoms

Two people can have different psychological responses to the same occurrence. One of these is the onset of symptoms. It is hard to tell when you will start experiencing emotional distress symptoms.

Determining the Value of an Emotional Injury

Because proving an injury is difficult, quantifying your emotional injuries becomes even more difficult. These injuries are intangible. As such, assigning a degree or level of damage to these injuries to value them is hard. What you end up with is a largely subjective process.

Your lawyer can evaluate your case and determine how much compensation is enough to cover the full scope of your damages. The lawyer will consider your medical expenses, lost income, and average settlements for car accident claims during the calculation process.

Proving an Emotional Injury Isn’t as Straightforward as Proving a Physical Injury

Emotional injuries can be attached to physical injuries or can be experienced on their own. The former is easier to prove. It’s generally accepted that you will have emotional trauma after an accident that leaves you injured. It’s also widely accepted that the more severe an accident is, the likelier you are to suffer emotional damage.

Still, personal injury cases involving emotional distress have a high burden of proof. Here are some resources to help you attach tangible proof to your claim:

Your Testimony

One of the most crucial steps after an accident or traumatic incident is to document or journal your day-to-day experiences. This documentation helps form your testimony, which is fundamental evidence in an emotional injury claim. Document your feelings, worries, and how your state affects your work, relationships, health, and quality of life. Because there are no visible injuries, your ability to draw a mental picture of what’s going on internally is valuable to your suit.

Medical Records

Get treatment for emotional distress as soon as you notice any symptoms. Your healthcare professional will suggest treatment options like cognitive therapy, counseling, rehabilitative care, and even medication like antidepressants and sleeping pills. This will ensure you are getting the care you need to recuperate. Additionally, your health records and treatment plan can help highlight emotional distress and disruption to your life.

Other symptoms of emotional trauma like a poor appetite can also be evidenced by weight loss. This information will be useful when suing for emotional distress after a car accident. It’s also useful in common types of car accident lawsuits.

Employment Records

Emotional trauma can make it hard for someone to perform optimally at work. For example, insomnia and lethargy take away your concentration, which will affect productivity. So will the days you have taken off for medical treatment. Your employer or supervisor can provide reports of your work life, detailing the employee you were before and after the accident. Be sure to document missed days of work that resulted in loss of income or wages.

Show the Duration and Progression of Your Injuries

Recurring or persistent pain that remains present over time proves an emotional injury better than a short-lived emotional reaction. Therefore, you need to show that your emotional injury and its symptoms have led to prolonged therapy and medication use or have altered your professional and personal life for an extended duration.

Showcasing a pattern and progression of your distress can also help support your lawsuit. For example, if your mental state began with initial shock, and progressed to anxiety, then to PTSD, this escalation paints a clear picture of the long-term consequences of your injury.

Calculating Emotional Distress Damages

How much can you get for emotional damages, and is it worth suing after a car accident? Your lawyer will consider many factors when determining the value of your emotional distress damages. These factors include:

The Severity of Your Injuries

An accident that leads to disability is seen to have caused more emotional damage than an accident that results in a broken wrist. So, the compensation for a disabling injury will be higher than a broken wrist.

Impact on Daily Life

Your lawyer will look at the decline of your quality of life, the impact on relationships, and job loss when determining the worth of your emotional injury claim. Be sure to tell your lawyer how your injury has affected you. Share a copy of your diary containing details of how your injury has impacted all aspects of your life.

Progression and Duration of Injury

Your lawyer will want to ascertain the presence of effects like depression, substance abuse, PTSD, and anxiety. The more severe the symptoms, the higher the damages.

Duration of Recovery

Longer recovery durations mean longer duration of suffering. So, your lawyer will take your duration of recovery into account when calculating the value of an emotional injury claim. The amount of damages for emotional injuries with longer recovery durations will be higher than those with shorter recovery periods.

Whether You Were Liable for the Accident

Illinois employs modified comparative fault to determine how liability for an accident will be distributed between the directly involved parties. This means that if you are found to be partially at fault for your injury, your damages will be reduced based on your liability percentage. If you are 25% liable for your injuries, the damages you get will be 25% lower. You will not receive compensation if you are more than 50% responsible for the accident that caused your injury.

The Multiplier Method

The Multiplier method is the most common approach for computing damages in personal injury claims. This method is used in both physical impairment and emotional suffering. The formula uses injury severity to determine a multiplier. Multipliers are between 1 and 5, with one assigned to mild injuries, and the number gradually going up with the severity of the injury.

Your best shot at successfully suing for emotional injury after an accident in Illinois is to hire an experienced personal injury lawyer. The lawyer will diligently guide and support you and protect your best interests. This means providing direction on accident investigation, evidence collection and preservation, getting competent expert witnesses, proper damage computation, and settlement negotiation. While 95% of personal injury cases never go to trial, your attorney will represent you in a trial should it get to that point. If you are planning to sue for emotional injury in Peoria and Chicago, Illinois, don’t struggle alone. Contact us at Strong Law Offices for a free case evaluation.