Emotional distress is a term that is related to and is often used in conjunction with the term pain and suffering. Emotional distress refers to the psychological or emotional impact experienced as a result of an event or Personal Injury Attorney in Lincolnville SC. It can include symptoms such as anxiety, depression, fear, humiliation, mental distress, and other psychological problems. Emotional distress focuses on the mental distress and suffering that a person experiences as a result of the incident.
Emotional distress is included among the damages caused by pain and suffering, but it is not the same as pain and suffering. Emotional distress most often occurs when an accident victim witnesses another person suffering a traumatic injury or death, or when they themselves suffer a traumatic injury. Emotional distress is just one aspect of the damage caused by pain and suffering. Emotional distress can result from the trauma of the accident itself or the effects of your physical injuries. Defining emotional distress can be difficult because this type of pain and suffering may or may not revolve around actual physical injuries.
Emotional distress can be caused by the original incident, the injuries, the recovery process, and the fact that a person may not be able to live life the same way as a result of the injuries. All of these harms focus on how a person is affected emotionally, not physically. For example, emotional distress will not include compensation for headaches or backaches. Although physical injuries can contribute to mental and emotional distress, they are not actually damages due to emotional distress. Compensation for physical injuries is covered elsewhere.
Some common synonyms for distress are agony, misery, and suffering. While all of these words signify the state of being in big trouble, distress implies an external and usually temporary cause of great physical or mental tension and stress. Some common synonyms for suffering are agony, distress, and misery. While all of these words signify the state of being in big trouble, suffering involves conscious resistance to pain or distress.
Victims can also suffer emotional distress due to the loss of a loved one or physical and mental pain resulting from their own injuries. Perhaps most importantly, the content of your emotional distress claim is the primary factor in calculating the amount of compensation that should be sought for the damages you suffered, that is, the nature and extent of what you have suffered, the impact it has had on your life and how you can reasonably anticipate that it will affect your life in the future. Quantifying emotional distress damages after a car accident can be complicated and will likely require an experienced car accident attorney to help the victim obtain adequate compensation. A fixed amount of compensation is not paid to victims of personal injury for emotional distress, but an attorney can use a multiplier method in which he calculates total economic losses and then multiplies them by a certain number to arrive at a fair amount of non-economic compensation. Emotional distress, pain and suffering, and other psychological injuries deserve compensation as do physical injuries after a car accident.
An attorney will work with trusted medical and psychological experts to properly calculate non-economic and emotional damages to ensure that you receive fair compensation. Proving emotional distress in a court of law is often difficult, as it is something that cannot be physically observed or measured. Because, in fact, there is good scientific evidence for both an adaptive response to stress and a state of distress, it is important to distinguish these terms. If a doctor has diagnosed emotional distress as part of the injuries you sustained in a car accident, you may be able to obtain compensation as part of the pain and suffering damages contained in your personal injury case.
In New York, you will also be required to prove that you suffered physical injuries in the car accident that are directly related to your emotional distress. For example, short-term restraint causes no notable adjustment problems, whereas prolonged restraint can cause behavioral or physiological distress, sometimes expressed by vocalization or gastric ulcers (Ushijima et al. Emotional distress, which is part of the damage caused by pain and suffering, occurs when the negligent actions of another person cause some type of mental harm. For the most part, emotional distress falls under the umbrella of the pain and suffering that ends up suffering in a car accident. We will see that emotional distress is only part of the general non-economic damages commonly sought in a personal injury or wrongful death lawsuit.