Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among involved in a car accident
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among involved in a car accident
Car accidents are given stressful even from someone who have just witness a car accident and stressful is an understatement coming from someone who have just experienced a car accident. There are many sprouting emotions and mental phenomenon that could be felt before, during, and especially after an accident. According to people who have first-handedly experienced car accident, mood swings that translates to anger up to guilt is experienced, the anxiety and breakdowns also manifests at some point following an accident. At extreme extent, disrupted sleeping patterns may develop and nightmares are experienced too, the consideration of phobias of riding or seeing a car is also possible too.
According to National Institute of Mental Health (
NIMH), traffic collisions and crashes are leading caused of
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among american citizens as 39.2% of all traffic collisions and crashes survivors have developed PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has a long history run among citizens but hasn't been medically recognized not until the 1970s after few wars. Since then, PTSD has been found out and widely common among people that time and explained that it was caused by various traumatic events not only the series of years of wars.
From such context, it could be also concluded that car accidents can cause PTSD and individual suffer a significant decrease on quality of life and etc.
Factors why PTSD following an accident is likely to develop:
According to medical experts, PTSD and other mental conditions are as dangerous and damaging as any tangible and visible injuries sustained in an accident. There are quite few reasons why similar mental illnesses develop after an accident and these are overlooked compared to physical injuries which is dangerous for few reasons:
- Physical injuries usually appear to be deadly when examined by physicians and since victims usually call doctors who are specialized in open injuries, mental health is given little to none medical attention.
- For most people, the onset of manifestation of trauma and other emotions are processed long that they appear few days or weeks following an accident.
How to tell if a person is undergoing a PTSD after an accident
Similar to closed physical injuries, mental damages such as PTSD have not-so-definitive symptoms that can be used to tell if a person who is involved in an accident recently is experiencing PTSD. Some of them are:
- Doesn't want to talk about the recent accident even if it needed by police investigators and even avoids the accident itself or anything that reminds him/her about the accident
- They experience surprise attack of anxiety or panic that has been unknown until the recent crash
- Isolation and change of mood
- Severe anxiety about their surrounding that there are dangers and risks that would catch them off-guard
Call Ryan LLP
If ever one of your family members or closests friend has been involved in a road accident and have developed sort of mental condition and have
sustained either minor or significant injuries and even a possible disability because the driver has shown apparent negligence and recklessness and
caused an accident and render the victim to have life-threatening injuries and condition, you can always refer help from a professional experienced injury lawyer to smoothen things out as your hired lawyers can help you decide from their factual and legal advices.
Ryan LLP is an Ohio based injury lawyer that represents victims of personal injury caused by car accidents, medical malpractice due to medical professional's negligence, and even wrongful death against large companies, agencies and even individuals. We have 40 years of experience doing our service in this field and evidently successful with our civil litigations. Call our office now for free legal consultation.