Psychiatric Injury: Victims of circumstance

Liam Ryan reports on claims by rescuers and secondary victims, and assesses the need for law reform ‘Is it not time to at least consider if people who provide more than “trivial or peripheral assistance” in the wake of a disaster should also be classed as rescuers in a new, and wider, concept?’ In recent …
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Psychiatric Injury: ‘Nervous shock’ – where are we now?

Andrew Hogarth QC analyses the recent approach of the courts to compensate primary and secondary victims ‘The acceptance by courts that some unmeritorious primary victims can succeed has led inevitably to a desire to ensure that secondary victims who are considered by the trial judge to be meritorious will succeed.’ Most would agree that the …
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Case Report: Jones v Ramshaw [2011] (unreported 5 September 2011)

Liability; psychiatric injury; secondary victims The judge preferred the claimant’s psychiatrist’s diagnosis of PTSD over the defendant’s psychiatrist’s diagnosis of deep grief.This case provides an illuminating consideration of the scope of liability in this difficult area of law. Facts On 2 November 2006, the claimant’s daughter was one of four teenage girls in the back …
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