Injuries may be physical ailments, but the impact that they have can go far beyond that. An injury could disrupt a victim’s personal life, do terrible damage to their finances, and harm their mental well-being. The full impact of an injury goes far beyond what doctors and hospitals can treat on their own. To be made whole again, a victim needs to turn to other experts, including mental health professionals and, in some cases, attorneys.
Understanding the mental trauma of an injury
Talking about physical and mental health as though the two are separate can be a useful rhetorical device, but it belies the true nature of those two dimensions of human health. The reality, experts agree, is that physical and mental health are intertwined and interrelated. When something impacts one in a positive or negative way, it affects the other.
Take mental health issues like depression and anxiety, point out the experts at Therapy Group of NYC. Big-city living in places like New York City can bring out or exacerbate these issues, so Therapy Group of NYC knows all about them — including the fact that such mental health issues can trigger physical symptoms like headaches, aches and pains, nausea, and fatigue.
Similarly, injuries and illnesses can bring down a person’s mental health. This is particularly true when an injury is triggered by a traumatic event such as a car crash. In such cases, a victim can develop a condition related to the trauma, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Injuries, finances, and a victim’s lifestyle
Part of the reason that injuries and illnesses can have such an impact on the mental health of their victims is that these same injuries also disrupt all sorts of things beyond a person’s health — including high-stress things like personal finances. Getting hurt or sick isn’t cheap, and medical bills can trigger debts that linger and destroy a victim’s credit rating and financial future.
Sometimes, there’s not much to be done about this. But, in other cases, there’s an issue of justice involved. Injuries can be caused by others: For instance, another driver’s negligence might cause a car accident that results in terrible injury. The victim could be left with steep medical bills, terrible pain, lost income (due to days and weeks of missing work while receiving medical treatment), and even debilitating long-term disabilities, which have further personal and financial repercussions themselves.
In such cases, it’s unfair to ask the victim to bear the entire burden of their misfortune. After all, it wasn’t their negligence that caused the accident — it was someone else’s. This is where personal injury law comes in.
Personal injury law and becoming whole again
Personal injury law is about making things right. A personal injury lawyer helps make victims whole again by getting them the funds that they need and deserve. Funds recovered through a personal injury case settlement or court award can be life-changing for victims, allowing them to pay down medical debt, get back on their feet financially, and enjoy some compensation for their terrible trauma, pain, and ongoing struggles.
Nothing can undo the trauma of an accident, and nothing can give a permanently disabled person their life back. But a personal injury lawsuit can at least give victims the resources they need to rebuild. A victim of an injury should seek out mental health care as well as medical help — and they should consider seeking out an attorney who specializes in personal injury cases, too. Doing so could give them a fair shot at the justice that they deserve.
