What Happens When Mental Illness Makes Your Injuries Worse?

For most everybody, the complications from an accident can have a severe effect on our mental health. The stress, fear, and anxiety over our finances, lives and health, as well as ruminating on the way our lives may be different post accident, can significantly alter an accident victim’s mood, affect and personality.

But as difficult as post-accident recovery can be, and for as much of an impact that it can have on our mental health, the impact is even worse, for people with a pre-existing mental illness, such as anxiety and depression.

Additional Damages for Pre Existing Mental Illness

So if you are in an accident, and you have a mental illness that is making your post accident recovery longer, more traumatic, or more difficult, can you get additional damages? Can a jury look at and consider your mental illness, in determining your pain, suffering, or anxiety, after the accident?

The answer is yes, and it’s because of an old legal doctrine called the eggshell Plaintiff doctrine.

The eggshell Plaintiff doctrine says that a Defendant finds a Plaintiff the way the Plaintiff is, and must accept the consequences of whomever that Plaintiff happens to be.

So, for example, if the victim happens to be more susceptible to pain, and thus, suffers more—that’s not the victim’s fault, rather, that’s something the Defendant must compensate the victim for. If the victim happens to have a weak heart, and the accident causes a heart attack, that’s not the victim’s fault.

Similarly, if the victim has depression or anxiety or PTSD or any other kind of mental illness, and the victim’s pain, anxiety or recovery is worse or slower than it would have been, the Defendant can’t “blame” the mental illness. The Defendant can’t legally argue to a judge or jury that you’re “making it worse” because you have real, documented, mental illness.

Rather, the Defendant must accept the victim as the victim is, even if that means compensating the victim more, because the victim is suffering more, because of the pre-existing mental illness.

Should You Disclose Mental Illness?

The real burden to recovering or injuries that are made worse because of mental illness, isn’t the legal burden—it’s often the victim’s willingness or lack thereof, to share or discuss the pre-existing mental illness. Many people simply don’t want the details of their pre-existing mental illness shared with the other side, or with a jury in trial.

Is it worth it? Is the invasion of what is otherwise a private matter, worth what you may stand to recover from a jury if you were open about mental illness in a trial? That is something to discuss with your injury attorney, and is certainly an individual choice that you have to make.

Contact our Rhode Island injury lawyers at Robert E. Craven & Associates at 401-453-2700 today if you have suffered injuries in an accident that affect your physical, and mental health.

Sources:

fpamed.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/eggshell-plaintiff.pdf

rid.uscourts.gov/juryinstructions/jccv_negligence_eggshell_skull_doctrine