Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Turning the Tide without Opening the Floodgates

Abstract

The development of the legal concept of nervous shock represents a compromise between the need to compensate those suffering psychiatric damage and the need to protect a defendant from unlimited liability. The criteria which have developed to achieve this balance are arbitrary ones, which take little account of psychological or physiological knowledge about post traumatic stress disorder. It is suggested that recent developments in scientific understanding of this condition could usefully inform the legal process, and that some aspects of the dilemma could be avoided.