For many people, accidents don’t just cause immediate pain, stress, injury and financial loss. The trauma of the accident, pain of recovery, and ongoing symptoms of injury can all cause lasting mental and emotional damage that may take a long time to heal.
Depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following an accident or severe injury can be severe enough to change your life. Although they are different psychiatric conditions, they can cause many of the same effects, including:
- Difficulty sleeping
- Memory and concentration problems
- Difficulty controlling emotions and reactions
- Lack of motivation
- Fatigue
These effects can make it difficult for you to focus or concentrate on your job, tasks or personal interactions. Your family life, career and finances may be severely affected.
Proving Your Case
Some emotional difficulty is expected, especially following serious permanent injury such as brain or spinal damage. Less well-known, however, is the emotional harm that can result from chronic pain or from an accident in which all the physical damage is healed.
Unfortunately, because a psychological injury is invisible, it can be very hard to prove. It can be tempting for family members, insurance agents, judges — and sometimes even for our clients — to assume that all a sufferer needs is to simply toughen up and get over it.
Even when you are able to prove that your emotional difficulties are real and debilitating, it can be difficult to connect them to your injury, especially if you had any history of mental illness before the accident.
We can help. We can listen to your story and see whether your symptoms began or were made worse by the accident. We can argue on your behalf to insurance agents, and work to make sure that your suffering is not dismissed simply because it cannot easily be seen.
We can get compensation for your losses.
