Psychiatric injury was explained in the case of Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire (1992) as ‘a sudden assault on the nervous system’ and ‘a sudden appreciation...of a horrifying event, which violently agitates the mind’. In today’s society, where mental health is treated in the same terms as physical health, it should follow that psychiatric injury be given the same legal status as physical injury.
However, with regard to injury and medical claims, the legal system has not yet caught up with medical advancement. It is usually possible to claim for psychiatric injury in situations where there is a combination of physical and psychiatric injury. In cases where the injuries sustained by the claimant are purely psychiatric, it is far more difficult for a claim to succeed.
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