Causing Psychiatric and Emotional Harm: Reshaping the Boundaries of Legal Liability

Though mental harm can be profoundly disabling, the law imposes strict limits on who can recover damages for it. In the absence of physical injury, compensation is not normally available for negligently-caused mental suffering, however severe, unless it constitutes a 'recognizable psychiatric illness.' Claimants whose mental trauma stems from injury caused to someone else are subject to arbitrary restrictive liability rules that dispense with established legal principles and cannot be reconciled with scientific advances. It is argued that the reluctance to provide redress reflects an enduring suspicion of intangible injury and undue fear of proliferating claims. The scale and legal ramifications of the Hillsborough disaster (the Sheffield, England football stadium stampede), the emergence of claims arising from work-related stress, and other new categories of claims based mainly on prior relationships between the parties, have all added to a 'floodgates fear' that has intensified due t