Personal injury claims provide compensation for the lost wages, medical expenses, and other financial damages that people sustain due to negligence. Personal injury law protects victims from financial devastation and discourages negligent behavior. But it also compensates people for the pain and suffering they endure. In personal injury, pain and suffering is monetary compensation for non-monetary damages.
What Exactly Does Pain and Suffering Account For?
Physical injuries can temporarily or permanently decrease a person’s quality of life. Healing from injuries entails physical pain, and sometimes, this pain can linger long after the healing process has ended. Many injury victims also suffer from anxiety, depression, and mental fatigue along the way. Pain and suffering provides monetary compensation for these things and more.
Some physical injuries can have a long-term impact on how people look and function, as well as on how they feel. These include debilitating injuries, disfiguring injuries, and even traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). People with TBIs can face lifelong challenges with memory and cognition. TBIs can also affect victims’ ability to form and maintain meaningful relationships.
Known as compensatory damages, monetary damages cover the costs of treating injuries. Awards for pain and suffering compensate people for the anguish of experiencing and living with injuries.
Types of Pain and Suffering
There are three distinct types of pain and suffering that an injury victim can experience. These are physical, emotional, and loss of enjoyment.
Physical pain and suffering accounts for the immediate pain of injuries and the pain felt during the recovery process. It also accounts for the lingering aches that a person might feel even after they’ve completed their recovery. Although the goal of medical treatment is to return a person to their pre-injury state, some people never enjoy full recoveries. A person with a shattered hip, broken vertebrae, or nerve damage might experience discomfort for the rest of their life.
Emotional pain accounts for the mental anguish and trauma of healing. It also considers the lingering effects that an injury event has on a person’s mental health. For instance, if you’re in a major car accident, you might be too anxious to ride in cars or drive again. Following traumatic injury events, many people develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sleep difficulties, and depression. People with TBIs can struggle lifelong with emotional dysregulation, and they frequently experience repeated bouts of severe anxiety and depression.
The claims process itself can cause emotional suffering. Being unable to work while facing mounting legal and medical bills places people under tremendous strain.
Loss of enjoyment is compensation for being unable to engage in or enjoy specific activities due to changes in mobility, cognition, or other areas of health. A person who loses the ability to walk can receive compensation for being unable to participate in daily activities or hobbies that once brought them pleasure.
Why Is Pain and Suffering So Hard to Calculate?
Monetary damages are relatively easy to calculate. Victims or their attorneys can tally lost wages, medical bills, receipts for medical supplies, transportation costs, and other recovery-related expenses. Pain and suffering is entirely subjective. There’s no universal formula for measuring or legally dictating the economic value of a person’s anguish.
There’s also no documentation or other evidence to support pain and suffering. Lacking these things, it’s difficult to accurately quantify a person’s anxiety, depression, and overall mental anguish. It’s also difficult to assign it an appropriate dollar value.
Pain and suffering is the area of personal injury that causes the most problems for victims who attempt to represent themselves. When facing knowledgeable claims adjusters on their own, victims can easily underestimate the value of their pain and suffering. They can also underestimate its widespread and often lingering effects. A person who’s been in a serious car accident might not recognize that being nervous to drive or avoiding driving altogether is something they can receive compensation for.
When negotiating settlements, attorneys and insurance companies typically use one of two methods to determine pain and suffering amounts. With the multiplier method, they simply multiply the amount of economic damages by an agreed-upon number. In most cases, this number is between 1.5 and 5, with 5 being used for severe injuries that have lifelong effects.
The per diem method assigns a specific per-day dollar amount to a person’s pain. Pain and suffering is then calculated based on the number of days that the victim is expected to experience pain. This method is most commonly used with less severe injuries. Attorneys often anchor per-diem rates to victims’ daily wages with the assumption that their pain and suffering is at least as valuable as their working time.
How Can Hiring a Personal Injury Lawyer Help?
Hiring a personal injury lawyer can sometimes alleviate pain and suffering by making the recovery process less stressful and overwhelming. More importantly, it can help accident victims maximize this portion of their settlements.
Attorneys ensure that no aspect of their clients’ pain and suffering is overlooked. They encourage their clients to seek diagnosis and treatment for mental health issues, including PTSD, depression, and anxiety. The costs of these treatments will fall under monetary/compensatory damages, but they’ll also provide a basis for determining pain and suffering amounts.
When accident victims have injury lawyers, insurance adjusters become far less likely to use low-balling tactics in this frequently undervalued area. They’re also less likely to rush victims into settlements before they’ve considered or addressed the potentially long-term mental and physical anguish caused by their injuries.
Attorneys can draw upon their extensive case histories and overall experience to determine just how much their clients’ injuries will impact their quality of life. They can also call upon medical experts to assist in quantifying pain and suffering, whether by validating trauma, establishing causation, or projecting future effects.
If you were injured in a serious accident such as a bike accident where someone else was at fault, you should get in touch with an experienced attorney or team of attorneys who can help you get the legal aid you need for bicycle accident injuries.
