If you suffered injuries in a car accident due to another driver’s carelessness or recklessness, you have the right to seek compensation for the financial and psychological costs of your injury.
Psychological costs are commonly referred to as non-economic damages, as they involve impacts on the sufferer’s life that don’t generally result in a bill for services or a payment receipt. This type of compensation is also often called pain and suffering damages, as pain and suffering are among the most common non-economic damages to appear in personal injury claims.
Pain and suffering damages often comprise a significant portion of the compensation ultimately paid to a personal injury claimant.
Here is a look at the quality-of-life impacts that personal injury claimants seek compensation for, how car accident lawyers value these impacts, and how much compensation you might recover for your pain and suffering. For specific advice regarding your case, contact an experienced Cape Girardeau car accident lawyer today.
What Impacts Result in Pain and Suffering?
Pain and suffering refers to the negative impacts the claimant experienced daily due to the accident. While medical expenses, wage loss, and other types of monetary losses are certainly an essential part of an injured party’s right to seek compensation for expenses and impacts of their injury, it is the joy of life and the ability to participate fully in activities with family and friends that makes it worth living.
Physical Impairment/ Permanent Disabilities
Personal injury claimants who have suffered temporary physical impairment or permanent disabilities often seek pain and suffering damages for their injury’s impact on their ability to earn an income and accomplish normal daily living tasks independently.
When the physical impairment involves a permanent disability, the claimant can be left to face the inability to complete a satisfying career or be required to train for and accept a lower-paying job that is better able to accommodate the injury, which can significantly impact their quality of life.
Additionally, many disabilities prevent the sufferer from performing personal care tasks unassisted. The impairment can cause them to make alternative living arrangements (such as moving in with family members that can help provide their care or moving to a home that does not have stairs).
Physical Suffering
Physical suffering includes the pain that the claimant experiences as a result of the injury. It also refers to pain caused by needed medical treatments, such as recovering from surgery to repair damage caused by the accident. Physical suffering can lead to dependence on pain medications and an unwillingness to participate in activities that could cause more pain.
The National Library of Medicine published a study on chronic pain notes that chronic pain produces several quality-of-life impacts, such as reduced productivity, wage loss, the onset or worsening of chronic diseases, and psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression.
Opioids are commonly prescribed to treat both acute and chronic pain. Unfortunately, these medications pose a high risk of dependence and have disastrous consequences related to their use, including overdose, respiratory compromise, increased sensitivity to painful stimuli, chronic constipation, and decreased energy or libido.
Emotional Distress
Injuries in an accident create negative impacts beyond the sufferer’s physical condition. Healthline explains that emotional distress occurs when an individual experiences an extreme level of unpleasant emotions.
These emotions are often arise after an injury and present with symptoms such as:
- A decline in work or school performance
- Withdrawal from family, friends, and enjoyable activities
- Feelings of guilt, hopelessness, irritability, or aggression
- Changes in sleeping and eating patterns
- Experiencing vague physical symptoms, including fatigue, headaches, or stomach aches
Loss of the Enjoyment of Life
Most healthy individuals have many activities that they enjoy participating in. These activities are often physical, such as hiking, dancing, or shooting hoops at the neighborhood park.
When an injury prevents a person from enjoying their hobbies, they can experience loneliness (notably if the enjoyable activity doubled as a source of social interaction), grief, and a feeling of not knowing what to do with their time. While many injured people can return to their activities after they’ve recovered from their injury, those who have permanent injuries will face a loss that is also permanent.
Inconvenience
Obtaining treatment for all injuries sustained in an accident is an integral part of obtaining a satisfactory level of recovery and preventing complications. It also creates a document trail that can make the injuries provable in the personal injury claims process.
Injured people typically experience significant interruptions to their daily life as a result of treatment, including frequent doctor’s appointments, the need to pick up prescriptions and other supplies, as well as the inability to perform daily household or personal care tasks.
Those injured in car accidents face more inconveniences due to their injury as they often no longer use their vehicle and must arrange for transportation to and from appointments. These inconveniences place yet another burden on the life of the injured party.
Disfigurement
As noted by a study published by Scientific Reports, others commonly stigmatize people who suffer disfigurement—particularly of the face, as faces are usually the first part of a person that others see.
The study involved monitoring the brain response of participants when shown before and after photos of disfigured people who had undergone plastic surgery. While one part of the brain responded to pictures of post-surgical faces, researchers found that a different part of the brain was activated when participants viewed photos of disfigurement. The results showed that implicit biases exist even when a person is unaware of the negative biases they hold against disfigured people.
Becoming disfigured due to an accident can cause the injured party to be subjected to discrimination and social isolation. They commonly feel shame or embarrassment over their changed appearance.
Loss of Consortium
Loss of consortium refers to the deprivation of benefits that a family or intimate relationship offers. These losses include companionship, affection, love, comfort, and sexual intimacy. Loss of consortium is non-economic damage commonly sought on behalf of the claimant’s spouse or family members if the claimant’s injuries deprive family members of these benefits.
While this damage was once only available for spouses or domestic partners as a result of the loss of sexual relations, courts across the nation are opening their interpretation of this type of loss to include comfort and companionship that other close family members grieve after a severe or permanent injury has occurred.
How Do Lawyers Calculate the Value of Pain and Suffering Damages?
There are several accepted methods of establishing a value for non-economic damages. Each of these methods requires the attorney valuing the claim to consider:
- The at-fault party’s insurance coverage. While it seems crass to mention insurance coverage when talking about the value of impacts on a person’s quality of life, the availability of this coverage is a major consideration when valuing the claim, as insurance policies come with coverage limits, meaning there is only so much money available through the policy for the claim. For example, if an at-fault driver had an auto liability policy with bodily injury coverage of $40,000 per person and you were the only one injured in the accident, it would not make sense to value the claim at $500,000 (unless there was more than one source of insurance coverage available), because that amount far exceeds the limits of the policy.
- The severity of the injury. More serious injuries typically result in a more extensive amount of treatment, which increases the amount of inconvenience that the injured party incurs. Additionally, serious injuries commonly produce more physical pain, emotional distress, and a greater risk of disabilities.
- The permanence of the injury. When a person seeks compensation for permanent injuries, not only are the impacts they have already faced taken into consideration, but their attorney must also calculate how many impacts they will likely face in the future due to their disability. Future expenses increase the claim’s value significantly, both on the economic and non-economic sides of the equation.
Any limitations on the amount of non-economic damages available in the state where your accident occurred. The Expert Institute notes that 11 states currently have caps on the amount of non-economic damages that can be sought through a personal injury claim, including Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Maryland, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Tennessee. Many other states have repealed caps placed on non-economic damages after finding that they’re contrary to the state’s constitution, including Florida, Illinois, New Hampshire, and Washington.
How Are Pain and Suffering Damages Proven?
In the personal injury claims process, insurance providers rarely pay the claimant compensation based on their word or the attorney’s word that they suffered. Evidence must be produced to show that these impacts actually existed.
Some of the types of evidence that can be used to prove non-economic impact in your case include:
- Testimony from doctors who treated you or have treated injuries like yours who can speak on the difficulties commonly encountered with this type of injury.
- Statements from family, friends, and your employer about the changes they’ve observed in your behavior or outlook since the accident occurred.
- Psychological evaluations indicating you have incurred negative impacts as a result of your injury, or even the diagnosis of psychological disorders such as depression or anxiety that were not present before the accident took place.
- Your own journal. Personal injury claimants are commonly asked to keep a journal to have a record of the day-to-day impacts of their injury, such as the inconvenience of frequent medical visits, fear about doing activities or going places that remind you of the accident, impacts on your quality of sleep or appetite, or other changes to your life that you observe.
- Photos of your injuries, particularly if you have incurred disfigurement.
Can You Sue for Non-Economic Damages Even If You Weren’t Physically Injured?
Being in an accident is stressful for anyone, even if they did not suffer a physical injury. Unfortunately, if a claimant did not suffer a medically treated injury, they typically can’t seek non-economic damages unless the loss of consortium compensation is being sought on their behalf through a claim filed for a spouse, domestic partner, or close family member.
Non-economic damages are available if the following circumstances are met:
- The accident is someone else’s fault.
- The accident resulted in physical injury.
- The emotional impacts suffered by the claimant resulted from the physical injury they suffered.
Wrongful death claims, where a family member or an administrator of the deceased’s estate seeks compensation for their loss, can seek pain and suffering damages.
How Important Are Non-Economic Damages to a Claim?
If non-economic damages are more difficult to prove than actual costs, such as medical expenses, wage loss, and property damage, is it necessary to include them in your claim?
Absolutely.
According to a report from Washington University Law Review, in claims determined by a jury, non-economic damages make up 50 to 80 percent of the overall jury award and quantify human suffering.
The compensation received for expenses often provides just that: a payment of medical bills, car repair or replacement, or a replacement of income loss. Pain and suffering damages, however, pay the claimant for the harm they sustained because of their injury—the loss of the claimant’s joy of life and the ability to participate fully in it.
Contact an Experienced Car Accident Lawyer Today
Cape Girardeau Car Accident Attorney, Phillip J. Barkett
How much you can get for pain and suffering and related damages depends on a variety of factors, such as the extent and severity of your injuries. The most effective way to determine the types and amounts of compensation you can receive is to consult an experienced Cape Girardeau personal injury lawyer. To learn more of your options for getting the full and fair compensation you need to cover all areas of your life your injuries affected, contact an experienced car accident lawyer for a free consultation.