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Gerard Malouf & Partners Manage Cases For Clients Across All Areas Of Personal Injury Law, Inheritance Disputes And Superannuation Disputes.

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Gerard Malouf & Partners Have Provided Friendly, Experienced Legal Advice To Communities Across Australia For Over 35 Years. Our Personal Injury Lawyers Have Taken On Ten’s Of Thousands Of Cases And We Are Proud To Have Won Billions Of Dollars For Our Clients.

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How Much Can I Sue for Emotional Distress?

Most everyday stress fades, but some events trigger lasting emotional pain. This distress can be just as serious as physical injuries and may entitle you to seek financial recourse.

Emotional distress can come from many different places, making it a complex injury to diagnose. Unlike a broken bone or a cut, emotional suffering often manifests in ways that aren’t readily apparent. This can include anxiety, depression, or even develop into physical symptoms like headaches or difficulty sleeping. Recognising these signs in yourself or loved ones is the first crucial step towards recovery and potentially, legal action.

If emotional distress stems from a personal injury caused by another party’s negligence or intentional act, you may be entitled to compensation. Filing an emotional distress claim allows you to seek financial recovery for the emotional impact of the injury and can be an empowering step on your road to recovery.

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Emotional distress explained

Emotional distress is a significant response caused by a specific event, ongoing situation or pattern of events. Life-altering events like accidents, injuries or witnessing traumatic events can trigger emotional suffering and distress.

You may notice emotional distress also categorised as psychological injury.

Unlike physical injuries, emotional damage doesn’t have obvious signifiers. At the same time, not everyone who experiences emotional distress will exemplify the same symptoms. Depression, anxiety and PTSD can feature some of the same indicators such as:

  • Insomnia
  • Long and unexplained periods of fatigue
  • Loss of appetite
  • Chronic anxiety or fear
  • Irritability
  • Difficulty concentrating
  • Withdrawing from friends and family.

You can become a victim of this type of injury from:

  • Your workplace
  • Sexual abuse
  • Medical complications
  • Recreational accidents
  • Travel accidents
  • Public area accidents
  • Car crashes.

Who can sue for emotional distress?

While emotional distress often leaves no physical scars, it can be a very real and debilitating consequence of witnessing or being involved in a traumatic event. The law recognises this and allows certain people to seek compensation for this distress.

You can claim if:

  • You’re directly involved: You sustained physical or psychological injuries in an accident or other negligence event. In this case, your distress stems directly from your experience in the accident.
  • You witnessed the injury: Witnessing a close family member or friend suffer a serious injury can also cause significant emotional distress. The emotional distress term often linked to this is pure psychological injury or nervous shock and could occur after seeing a loved one in the intensive care ward.
  • You have a close relationship to the victim: In some cases, even if you weren’t directly involved or a witness, you may be eligible to sue if you have a close relationship with the victim and the emotional distress is severe. For example, if you have lost someone close to you because of another party’s negligence, you may be entitled to file a wrongful death claim.

Types of emotional distress claims

Emotional distress claims fall into two main categories:

  • Negligent infliction of emotional distress
  • Intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Negligent infliction of emotional distress

This is the most common type of emotional distress found in claims. It occurs when someone’s negligence causes you emotional distress, even if they didn’t intend to do so.

For example, someone could be a physically uninjured passenger in a car crash caused by another person’s negligence. Experiencing the accident and fearing for their own safety could lead to the passenger developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that now affects their ability to drive comfortably. In this scenario, the passenger could be eligible to file a claim for emotional distress against the negligent driver.

Even if the negligent driver was their spouse, they can still make a compensation claim. The criteria for cases involving a loved one (including a spouse or family member) are the same as filing other emotional distress lawsuits.

If you and your lawyers can prove that the accident happened because the other party is at least partially at fault, you are eligible for personal injury compensation

Keep in mind that, while you may still receive some compensation if you are partially at fault, it will not be as much as if you had no fault at all.

In these types of cases, you must establish a breach of personal responsibility or duty of care. If your claim is successful, the resulting damages include expenses, lost wages and future economic losses. The result can be a significant payout.

Intentional infliction of emotional distress

While many psychological injuries are inflicted accidentally, others are intentionally imposed. These instances include situations where you can recall the other party purposefully caused trauma through predetermined actions.

How much can you sue for?

Like most cases involving injury, each claim is different. The significance of your psychological injuries is a major variable in how much compensation you can receive.

Here are some key factors that can influence the amount you receive:

  • Severity of emotional distress
  • Impact on your daily life
  • Medical documentation
  • Evidence of damages
  • Strength of the negligence claim.

 

Compensation is made to help supplement payouts to cover your medical treatments and economic damages and loss.

The difference between a permanent injury and one that will resolve over a short period will determine how much your payout is worth. Similarly, the duration of your injury can generate higher or lower compensation because your medical expenses will be stretched over a longer or shorter amount of time.

Each state has its own limit to non-physical damage compensation that affects how much a victim can earn for emotional harm.

GMP Law Case Study: Family receives $110,000 for emotional distress caused by a wrongful death

Our clients were family members who experienced emotional trauma due to the wrongful death of their loved one resulting from medical negligence.

For each of the family members, we obtained a psychiatric opinion to comment on the extent of the emotional distress that the incident caused. This enabled us to formulate a view as to the compensation amount of damages they could claim. We were able to obtain a settlement of $110,000 in totality for the family.

Documenting emotional distress

Earning compensation is only possible with proper documentation and filing within the statute of limitations. After a traumatic event, it’s important to seek help right away and start a journal of your experiences. Proof of emotional distress will help you win the maximum compensation amount for your damages.

  1. Acquire evidence
    Taking steps to file an emotional distress claim starts with acquiring evidence. This can involve regularly journaling your experiences following the accident, speaking with a psychiatrist, therapist or sleep specialist, and gathering testimonials from those who have interacted with you after the accident.

  2. Seek mental health care
    If you seek emergency mental health care for emotional distress, build up documentation of this as well. In short, you want to gather as much paper evidence as possible to support your case. A psychiatrist can be particularly helpful for developing a paper trail of your emotional progress after the accident, ranging from immediate impact to symptoms you developed over time.

  3. Speak with a psychiatrist
    When you begin the claim process, you may have to undergo questioning from a state-appointed psychiatrist. They will assess your level of psychiatric impairment, asking about your:

    • Self-care routine (if any)
    • Ability to sleep
    • Personal hygiene
    • Social interactions
    • Social functioning in relationships
    • Concentration
    • Recreational activities
    • Travelling
    • Concentration
    • Pace, persistence and adaptation back into normal life.


GMP Law is staffed with experts in the field of emotional distress and will handle your case with care. We offer advice and guidance to the survivors of abuse and severe emotional distress in a way that relieves the stress of dealing with the legal side of the matter. All members have been in the law business for a long time and are trained to care for psychological trauma victims compassionately and confidently.

Supporting you through your personal injury claim

Dealing with daily emotional stress is hard enough, adding on a lengthy legal process is another matter completely. Our accident lawyers are available to help you file a claim as quickly and quietly as possible. We’ve seen the ins and outs of emotional distress damages claims and can ensure you are prepared for every step of the way.

Coming to our law office for a personal matter such as this, we will take the utmost care of your case and ensure we handle it as much confidentially as possible.

GMP Law professionals specialise in emotional distress claims and we are the leading law firm for this type of case filing. If you’re ready to take back control of your psychiatric injury, give a GMP Law professional a call today.

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Gerard Malouf & Partners
 — Personal Injury Compensation Lawyers
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Gerard Malouf & Partners manage cases for clients across all areas of Personal Injury Law, Inheritance Disputes and Superannuation Disputes.
About Us
Gerard Malouf & Partners have provided friendly, experienced legal advice to communities across Australia for over 35 years. Our Personal Injury Lawyers have taken on ten’s of thousands of cases and we are proud to have won billions of dollars for our clients.
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Meet the diverse and dynamic team of compensation lawyers and supporting staff that have made this all happen below. Our multi-lingual team can discuss your claims in Arabic, Assyrian, Turkish, Greek, Italian, French, Serbian, Croatian, Armenian, Mandarin, Hindi, Punjabi or Malayalam.
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Meet the diverse and dynamic team of compensation lawyers and supporting staff that have made this all happen below. Our multi-lingual team can discuss your claims in Arabic, Assyrian, Turkish, Greek, Italian, French, Serbian, Croatian, Armenian, Mandarin, Hindi, Punjabi or Malayalam.

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