Nervous Shock: Where Lies the Future of Psychiatric Injury?

Abstract

In the early shock cases the need for foreseeability of injury by shock was not made clear. The courts were most hesitant to recognize shock as a kind of damage in its own right, and even after repudiating, the need for contemporaneous physical impact retained, for a time. The requirement that the plaintiff must be within the area of possible injury by impact…rather than shock -a theory which has been labeled the “impact theory”…However, the courts gradually began to appreciate that shock was a distinct kind of damage in itself, different from conventional cases of personal injury. This process was assisted by the recognition, in Hambrook v. Stokes Bros (1925) I KB 141 and subsequent cases that persons outside the zone of physical danger were owed a duty of care, because injury by shock was the only kind of injury that was foreseeable in such circumstances…The “shock theory” has thus replaced the “ impact theory”, and all the modern psychiatric damages cases affirm that the test is whether injury by shock was foreseeable.