Mental Health After Serious Accidents: How Trauma Impacts Personal Injury Lawsuits

It was a wet and snowy day in January, and Clara (name changed for privacy) was driving home from a visit to her sister’s house. Behind the wheel of her SUV, Clara was making her way through the less-than ideal weather conditions when a New York City Transit Authority bus attempted to make a left turn directly into her path. Unable to swerve away in time, the bus brutally crashed into Clara’s vehicle head-on, totaling her car and sending her rushing to the ER. Multiple bystanders witnessed the collision – at least three called 911, and one even captured a video of the crash.

Clara sustained a concussion and multiple fractures from the accident, but the worst of the pain didn’t start until after she’d returned home from the hospital – a fairly common occurrence for accident victims. She began experiencing excruciating pain in most of her body, particularly her back, neck, and shoulders – pain so severe it restricted her ability to move, sit, and even sleep. Scans revealed a major herniation in her cervical spine, which was compressing parts of her spinal cord and sending shocks of pain throughout her body. She also suffered from scapular winging syndrome, a rare condition that causes stabbing pain and limited range of motion in the shoulder.

When Clara first contacted our law firm for legal representation, the attorney who visited her to discuss her case noticed that she couldn’t climb the stairs or sit for too long without aggravating her pain. But Clara’s suffering extended far beyond the physical symptoms – our attorneys saw firsthand the emotional and mental impact of the accident. Plagued by intense panic, fear, and nausea, Clara rarely left her house, as cars triggered PTSD-like symptoms. Living in constant pain that doctors were unable to effectively treat, Clara lost her ability to work, exercise, and go out with friends. The trauma of this crash took a toll on not just her physical abilities, but her mental wellness, and Clara started to withdraw from the world.

Before the accident, Clara had been an energetic, active young woman. She loved long walks with her dog and playing with her niece and nephew. She had a job she enjoyed and boxing classes she attended as often as possible. The crash changed everything for her. Clara became depressed, anxious, and unable to find joy in her own life.

Clara is not the only one. As personal injury attorneys, particularly ones who specialize in catastrophic injuries, we are constantly exposed to the devastating impact serious accidents have on our clients’ lives. The impact goes far beyond the physical – emotional and psychological scars often run just as deep. Nearly every catastrophic injury client we meet suffers from some degree of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues as a result of their accident.

In this article, we aim to bring awareness to the effects of trauma that are not immediately visible and what it means for personal injury attorneys to represent clients and fight for justice in the courts.

Need to Know:

• In catastrophic injury cases, it’s very common to see clients exhibit signs of mental distress, including PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Even if they are never diagnosed with a clinical mental illness, the emotional impact of serious injuries is devastating for many clients, and the trauma can follow them for a long time, even a lifetime.
• You can – and often should – make mental health-related claims in a personal injury lawsuit when they are appropriate. These may be claims for pain and suffering or claims related to the economic impact of the accident, which highlight how the financial stress contributes to your mental health-related claims.
• It is possible to move forward from the mental and emotional harm caused by serious accidents, but certainly not easy. The feelings that may follow you now might never fully go away, but there are avenues of treatment that can help you find some semblance of peace. Your lawyer can help by connecting you with mental health professionals, thus making you better equipped to deal with the emotional trauma with which you may be struggling.

In this Article:

• The Relationship Between Mental Health & Serious Accidents
• Managing Mental Health After an Accident
• Telling Your Mental Health Story
• Mental Health Claims & Damages

The Relationship Between Mental Health and Serious Accidents

The trauma of a serious accident has a different effect on everyone. There are many different manifestations of the emotional struggle that comes with these injuries, and those manifestations can change month to month, day to day. Whatever you may be feeling is common, whether you’ve just experienced a traumatic accident or you’re helping a loved one through it. 

There are a few key indicators our attorneys will frequently observe in their clients. Being able to identify these feelings in yourself or a loved one early on can help ensure the appropriate intervention or treatment is provided at the right time.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Some clients, particularly those who revisit scenes reminiscent of their accidents, experience intense flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts that force them to involuntarily relive their traumatic experience. Clara, for example, couldn’t get in a car after her accident without suffering from anxiety, fear, and debilitating nausea. She couldn’t shake the terror that another bus would crash into her at any moment, and she kept flashing back to the moment of her collision. These are all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

PTSD often calls to mind images of combat veterans suffering after they return from the front lines, but PTSD can occur in anyone who experiences a traumatic event. In our line of work, the most common sources of trauma are car crashes and construction accidents, but surviving domestic violence, natural disasters, or violent crimes can all trigger PTSD. PTSD can have a debilitating effect on someone’s psyche – not only does it cause flashbacks and feelings of anxiety, fear, and irritability, it also tends to lead to avoidance. Clara’s distress whenever she got in the car meant that she started avoiding driving as much as possible, confining herself more and more to the house.

PTSD symptoms can be triggered by specific sensory input – the smell of burning rubber or the sound of sirens – or it can be triggered by seemingly nothing at all. Without proper treatment, PTSD can follow someone for a long time, making it challenging for them to live a normal life.

Tragically, we’ve seen many clients either receive a professional diagnosis of PTSD or suffer from PTSD-like symptoms. One client of ours, a building superintendent, was caught in an explosion caused by a buildup of carbon monoxide in the basement of his building. The explosion lifted him off his feet, blasted him down a hallway, and knocked him out cold. After the accident, he tried to return to work at the same building, but found himself reliving the accident every time he stepped into the basement. The constant fear not just of the explosion, but of being forced to relive the trauma of it, made it incredibly difficult for our client to simply go about his day, let alone go to work.

Depression and Grief

Grief is normal, even expected, after an accident. You’re mourning a significant loss, and that grief may take a long time to process. Even years into some of our cases, we hear from clients who are devastated by the fact that they are still suffering, still struggling to return to a normal life. It’s a feeling that may never go away, but ideally, it will get smaller and smaller over time, taking up less space in our clients’ minds over the years.

While grief is normal, it’s very easy for grief to spill over into depression. Depression is a mood disorder that affects not just how you’re feeling emotionally, but also how you think, sleep, eat, work, and spend your days. While depression is often characterized as intense feelings of despair and hopelessness, it can also leave you feeling empty, frustrated, worthless, and fatigued. Most people suffering from depression report little interest or pleasure in doing the things they once loved, and particularly severe cases may involve thoughts of self-harm or suicide.

After a serious accident, we often see these feelings build up over time in our clients. Many of our clients are former construction workers who define themselves by their work and ability to support their family through hard physical labor. Robbed of that ability by their injuries, they end up confined to their house, where pain and frustration can balloon into depression. This creates a vicious cycle – people with depression tend to self-isolate, but self-isolation only worsens their depression.

There’s also a mental element to physical pain. When we hurt all the time or are unable to reliably do the things we once did, it hurts our minds as well as our bodies. This can be demoralizing, frustrating, and ultimately, distressing, further feeding into someone’s depression.

Stress and Anxiety  

Like grief, worry accompanies almost every serious accident. The stress of managing physical rehabilitation, doctor’s appointments, and your legal case is enough to test anyone’s nerves. These cases also come with a large degree of uncertainty – over your health, your future, your finances, your legal outcomes, and more. This uncertainty – perhaps best understood by the injured person lying awake at night, wondering about unpaid bills, mortgage payments, rent, or college tuition for his or her child – can be crippling, and often leads to extreme stress.

Though anxiety is a part of everyone’s life and an expected part of a catastrophic injury case, it becomes an anxiety disorder when the persistent feelings of fear, dread, and uneasiness start to interfere with everyday life, as it does for many of the clients who come to us.

Anxiety can take many different forms. PTSD, for example, often comes with a number of anxiety symptoms, like uneasiness, dread, and fear. Many of our clients struggle with feelings of intense and uncontrollable fear or panic because of the sheer amount of uncertainty that comes with serious injuries. What happens if you were always the primary income earner, but now you’re disabled from work? What happens if you never regain the ability to walk on your own? These questions are scary, and unfortunately, all too common after an accident, leading to intense anxiety.

Managing Mental Health After a Serious Accident

Managing mental health after a serious injury is equally as important as managing physical health. The two intertwine in many ways, and ignoring one makes it harder to recover from the other. There’s no easy fix or one-size-fits-all approach to mental health, but there are paths forward that can alleviate the worst of your symptoms. Mental illness may never fully go away, but the goal of treatment is to make sure it takes up less space in your life every day.

Here are some things our attorneys recommend to clients they see struggling with their mental health.

Talk to Others About How You Feel

When we feel sick, hurt, or distressed, our first instinct may be to protect the people closest to us by hiding how we’re feeling. Many people try to keep their intense, painful emotions to themselves, out of fear of upsetting their loved ones or being seen as weak and worthless. We see this all the time – clients who say “I’m fine” or brush aside the question when asked how they feel, clients who share with us but try to keep the same thoughts from their loved ones, and clients who ignore or bottle up their emotions until, inevitably, they explode.

You should rely on your support network after a serious accident. It may feel strange to rely on people who are used to relying on you, but relationships are a two-way street. Your family, friends, and community are more vital than ever when you’re hurting. Relying on them is not a sign of weakness, rather, a sign of deep trust and strength.

Our attorneys also encourage clients to talk to them whenever they need to vent. After learning so much about your life and your accident, we know what you’re going through, and want to provide a listening ear whenever possible. One of the best things we can do for a client (besides winning the case) is to stop and listen with empathy and attention. We won’t be accessible all the time, but the time we devote to you will be entirely devoted to you.

Seek Professional Mental Healthcare

There will likely come a point in your recovery when you can’t lean on your traditional support systems – or your lawyer. You may want to protect the people closest to you from the true depths of your suffering, or those people may not be able to provide the support you need. When that time comes, we urge our clients not to manage their feelings alone, as that tends to make those feelings worse. Instead, we encourage them to speak with a mental health professional.

Historically, society has held negative attitudes toward mental health care, believing it to be either useless, foolish, or a sign of weakness. Different cultures and backgrounds also attach different stigmas to it, and you may have grown up hearing that therapy isn’t for “normal” people. But these attitudes have shifted rapidly in a short amount of time, and it’s much more normalized to seek professional mental healthcare. This shift has led more people to connect with the care they need, and it’s encouraging to see more and more of our clients agree to speak with a therapist.

The advantage in speaking to a social worker, psychologist, or psychiatrist is that it is their job to listen. There’s nothing too painful, too shameful, or too frightening to share, because they’ve been trained in these issues and know how to help you identify tangible solutions. There are a number of treatment options, ranging from medication to talk therapy to exposure therapy and beyond. Your provider will help find the ones most beneficial to you.

Of course, that’s not to say it’s easy to open up to a counselor. Giving a voice to your innermost emotions can be incredibly taxing. But talking about them with someone else allows you to share that burden, and, more importantly, gives you an avenue for treatment.

But it can also be hard to simply find a mental healthcare provider – in 2023, over half of adults with mental illness did not receive treatment. This is due to a variety of factors, including stigma, prohibitively high therapy costs, and provider shortages. If you want to find professional mental healthcare, you should talk to your attorney about finding someone. Though your attorney cannot (and should not try to be) your mental health provider, they likely have a vast network of providers they’ve worked with in the past. Our attorneys have connected many of their clients with therapists and psychiatrists who have either testified for past cases or treated past clients.

In Clara’s case, our attorneys could tell that she was suffering. The constant pain in her body and the fear of leaving her house made Clara self-isolate, further adding to her mental distress. It was more than just sadness about her accident; Clara’s depression was beginning to affect her ability to find any enjoyment in life at all. We connected Clara with both a psychiatrist and psychologist, where she was able to start receiving therapy and medication to manage her mental health.

Look for New Sources of Joy  

One of the worst things for depression is self-isolation. Withdrawing from the world can make it seem like the only thing in your life is misery, which is why many healthcare providers will recommend trying new activities to help alleviate depression symptoms. Tragically, serious injuries tend to take away many of our physical abilities, and it may be a lot more difficult (or even impossible) to even go on a walk for fresh air. This is one of the uniquely devastating impacts of serious injuries – when a treatment for depression is to do the things you love, what happens when you can’t do those things anymore?

There’s no easy answer to that question, but our attorneys do like to emphasize the importance of trying to find new sources of joy in your life or re-engaging with your remaining places of joy. Taking your mind off the pain, even if just for a short while, can make an enormous difference.

You may not be able to work in the same capacity or play the same sports, but there may be other jobs or similar activities you can pick up during your recovery. Talk to your doctor about what you can safely do without aggravating your injuries. For example, one of our clients regularly goes on long drives with his cousin. This gives him a change of scenery and a chance to chat with a loved one. It’s simple, but it has a big impact.

One of our attorneys likes to talk with clients about their children, connecting with them over the joys of being a parent. It can be a source of frustration, to not be able to play catch or go on bike rides with their kids anymore, but clients may be able to find new activities to share with their kids, like playing board games. It can also be helpful just to talk about the things in their lives that do bring them happiness, because it’s a reminder that those things still exist and gives them a moment to think about something other than their pain.

Telling Your Mental Health Story in Court

When considering what our client’s injuries have taken from them, our attorneys plan to address: “What does it do to the heart of a man?” In other words, our attorneys are tasked with illustrating the full picture of what has been lost to our clients – whether that be physical ability, mental health, careers, sports, hobbies, relationships, or more. When you’re used to being physically capable, when you’re used to earning your living and providing for your family, what does it mean when that is taken away? Beyond just the economic impact, what is taken from someone’s sense of self?

To answer these questions for a jury, your attorney must find ways to share your story that are authentic, empathetic, and detailed without being exaggerated or sterile. But this process can be challenging for a client – it’s hard enough to share their pain with an attorney, and now they’re expected to share it with a jury of strangers. To help tell your story, your attorney will use all the evidence available to them, but some of the best evidence at his or her disposal is testimony. Other people can craft a story that the hard evidence, like medical records and economic data, will complete.

Some people who may be called to testify include:

• Your loved ones. Loved ones are often the best at describing the practical effects of a serious accident. For example, a client’s child can talk about the bike that’s gathering cobwebs in the shed ever since their parent’s accident, as there’s no one to go on bike rides with them anymore. Ideally, that visual will stick with the jury for some time. Had Clara’s case gone to trial, her sister would have testified before the jury, talking about how Clara used to be her children’s favorite playmate. Since the accident, Clara has been unable to play with her niece and nephew, which has taken something from both Clara and the children.
• Your healthcare providers. To fully demonstrate the mental health impact of your injuries, your attorney may ask your therapist or other mental healthcare provider to testify on your behalf. Their professional insights add credibility to the more emotional appeals, and their diagnoses can help prove that your worsened mental health is a direct result of your accident.
• Yourself. You are your own best advocate, and you are the most well-equipped to tell your truth. Your attorney can help sketch the outline, but your testimony will more fully paint the picture than anyone else could. On the witness stand or in a deposition, you will be asked to honestly reveal how the accident has affected you, without sugarcoating or exaggerating.

It’s important to know that if you wish to keep certain details private, you are not obligated to share them with the court. For example, if you agree to release your therapy records to the courts, everything you discuss in therapy will become available to the courts. Though this may be helpful for shedding light on your case, it can also be uncomfortable to share everything with the jury and defense. One of our clients had been in therapy since the accident, and we asked him if he’d be willing to release those documents to the court. He adamantly refused, not wanting the topics he’d talked about to be brought up in the case, and our lawyers respected his decision. Ultimately, you should talk to your lawyer to decide the best course of action for your case together.

Mental Health Claims & Damages

When filing a lawsuit, you can make claims for mental health in a few ways:

• Pain and suffering: These two terms are not synonyms under the law. “Pain” refers to the physical suffering endured because of a victim’s injuries, while “suffering” is legally defined as “the loss of enjoyment of life.” Both allow you to recover monetary damages through a settlement or jury verdict.
• Mental health injury claims: If your attorney can prove that you developed a mental health condition as a direct result of an accident, you will be able to claim it as an injury. In a Bronx case handled by our attorneys, a therapist’s testimony and care records helped prove that our client’s depression was a direct result of his accident. The jury decided, unanimously, that in addition to his orthopedic injuries, the mental injuries were caused by the accident too. This allowed our client to recover greater monetary damages.
• Economic claims: Your mental healthcare provider will put together a care plan, estimating the amount of psychological intervention you may need to address your mental health struggles. Our attorneys will take that plan and ask an economist for the estimated cost, which can be factored into the award. Very few clients will need lifelong mental health care, but there are instances where extended medication use or years of therapy will be necessary.

The money from a settlement or jury verdict in your favor can alleviate some of the emotional distress by easing financial burdens. If you’re constantly worried about affording rent or groceries while you’re out of work recovering from your accident, that stress is yet another mental burden. A settlement or favorable jury verdict can remove the financial uncertainty, giving you and your family more options and some degree of relief. That relief helps ensure a future with less stress and more options.

Consult an Attorney

You want to feel comfortable reaching out to your attorney, knowing that they will be there to listen and rely on. That’s why it’s especially important to find a lawyer you trust and respect, one you know will be responsible and empathetic when you reach out. Attorneys who specialize in catastrophic injury have more experience helping similar clients and are better equipped to understand what you’re going through and know how they can help. If you’re seeking a proven, compassionate attorney to guide you through the legal process, contact Block O’Toole & Murphy by calling 212-736-5300 or filling out our Contact Form for a free legal consultation.