If you are dealing with injuries due to an accident that was not your fault, your life may feel as though it is upside down. Suddenly, your days are filled with medical appointments and treatments, you are unable to go to work while recovering your health. You have pain, anxiety, and stress. You may have heard that, when you file a personal injury claim, you may also be entitled to receive compensation for the pain and suffering you are experiencing. However, you may be in the dark as to what it takes to obtain an accurate pain and suffering calculation. Read on to find out.
Understanding Pain and Suffering
When it comes to the pain and suffering associated with a personal injury case, it is important to understand that there are two different types: physical and mental. Here is what each means.
Physical
This refers to the physical pain that the victim feels due to their injuries. It encompasses not only the discomfort and pain that they must endure daily but also any detrimental effect that they are likely to experience in the future because of the negligent actions of the defendant.
Mental
Living with an injury and physical pain impacts the daily life of the victim. They are now dealing with emotional distress, and mental anguish and they may have feelings of fear, anger, shock, humiliation, despair, shock, and anxiety, among others. In short, mental pain and suffering encompass any type of negative emotion in the victim that the accident has brought to their life. It is the full set of mental aspects that have arisen since the trauma of the accident.
When the victim is enveloped in mental pain and suffering, they may live with depression, anger, mood swings, and sleep disturbances. They may also have a lack of energy, sexual dysfunction, and a generalized loss of enjoyment of life which may include PTSD in its more severe manifestations.
Mental and physical pain and suffering may remain with the victim for many years, if not for life.
Calculating Pain and Suffering
Some expenses related to recovering your health after an accident are easy to add. They include the medical bills and other costs that you have had to pay or will have to pay in the future as well as the wages you have not earned while focusing on the medical aspects of your recovery. These are called economic damages and include any amounts that are easy to quantify.
On the other hand, pain and suffering are intangible and harder to attach a number to. However, there are ways to calculate these general damages.
Pain and suffering can be calculated by adding all your economic damages and then multiplying them by a number between 1.5 and 5. The more serious the injury and the clearer that liability has been determined, the higher the multiplier that will be used. Once you have placed a value on your general damages, you will add them to your economic damages in order to come up with the final amount that you will be seeking in your claim.
You may opt for a per diem amount and attach a daily number to your claim. It could either be $100 a day or an amount equivalent to your salary until you have healed.
