What is PTSD?
Right after a serious car accident, you don’t usually notice the emotional and psychological trauma like Post-traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD after a serious car accident. Instead, you typically feel the physical pain, like soreness, cuts, and bruising, and immediately get medical attention to heal your physical injuries.
People who have been involved in serious car accidents often experience PTSD either immediately following the accident or even months afterward.
According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, PTSD is a mental illness that involves exposure to trauma involving death or the threat of death, serious injury, or sexual violence. A traumatic event is often unexpected, frightening, overwhelming, and causes a lot of distress, like a serious car accident.
PTSD After a Serious Car Accident
People who have been involved in a serious car accident suffer from a wide range of symptoms of PTSD such as recurring memories or flashbacks of the accident, nightmares, a fear of driving, fear of riding in a car, social withdrawal, loss of libido, self-loathing, reduced interpersonal interaction, exaggerated responses to loud noises or sudden movements, known as hyperarousal, chronic pain, feelings of detachment from loved one, problems sleeping and an overall ill-feeling.
PTSD is overwhelming and debilitating and can be just as serious as a fracture, a bruise, or cut. Your everyday daily life activities and employment could become adversely affected. Your family and other interpersonal relationships can be strained. You can grow reclusive and start to isolate yourself in an unhealthy way.
Medical Advice and Treatment
Because PTSD can cause so much pain and suffering, it is crucial that you seek proper medical advice and treatment. One of the best ways to identify if you are suffering from PTSD is to visit a doctor as soon as possible following a serious accident or as soon as you start to experience any of the above symptoms. Your doctor can assess your symptoms, document findings, and set out a plan of therapy for you.
Getting help as soon as your symptoms present is crucial to helping you to get better.
Unfortunately, emotional and psychological trauma following a serious car accident often goes unnoticed. It is important to remember that injuries are not always physical, especially if you have been in a serious car accident. PTSD symptoms, like physical injuries, are compensable following a serious car accident. However, unlike physical injuries, PTSD symptoms are not objective injuries like physical injuries. PTSD symptoms cannot be seen like a broken leg or a cut and bruised hand. The impairments and frustration suffered by those who have PTSD are unique to them and their experience.
As a result, it is crucial that people who start to feel PTSD symptoms after being involved in a serious car accident, seek help from a medical professional who can document the symptoms clearly should you decide to seek compensation for your PTSD.
Getting Help
A personal injury lawyer can work with you and your medical provider’s hand in hand to ensure all of your PTSD symptoms and their debilitating effects are accurately and fully presented to an insurance company so that you can seek the compensation you deserve.
Seeking medical and legal assistance early is important to the success of any PTSD claim for damages.
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