A jury trial is a presumptive right in a personal injury action. This car accident injury occurred on Salt Spring Island when another vehicle, travelling in the opposite direction, turned left and into the path of the claimant’s vehicle. Given the complicated mental injury claim and other legal issues the claimant applied, unsuccessfully, to have the jury struck.…
Mental injury has also been referred to by courts as psychological injury, psychiatric injury, emotional trauma, nervous shock, hysteria, mental distress, and a host of medical terms such as conversion disorder, somatic system disorder, post traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression. The Supreme Court of Canada in Saadati has synthesized all these terms down to…
In a short but forceful unanimous three panel decision, the Court of Appeal has rung the death knell for the term “crumbing skull” to describe physical and mental conditions that may deteriorate in the future (Gordon v. Ahn,2017 BCCA 221). Other similar terms used by the court in the past include “psychological thin skull”, “eggshell personality” and “eggshell skull”.…
The Supreme Court of Canada has coined the phrase “mental injury” in a sweeping decision abolishing misguided prejudices over “psychological”, “emotional” or “psychiatric” injury claims in the law of tort. The requirement that an injury claimant suffer a medically recognized psychiatric or psychological illness or condition, as a bar to recover, has been eliminated. The ICBC injury claimant’s award of $100,000…