Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Related legal acts

Key definition

Damages definition

What does Damages mean? In legal practice, damages are a money award ordered by a court to compensate a claimant (England & Wales, Northern Ireland) or pursuer (Scotland) for loss caused by breach of contract, tort/delict or a statutory wrong. The remedy is developed mainly by case law across the UK and Ireland, with some statutory modification. The aim is primarily compensatory: in tort/delict, to put the person in the position they would have been in but for the wrong; in contract, to protect the expectation interest (and sometimes the reliance interest). Heads of loss include general and special damages (common in personal injury),...

Psychiatric injury liability in England and Wales: primary and secondary victims, foreseeability and proximity tests, statutory contexts, rescuers and employees, with updates from Paul and Young v Downey.

Published by a LexisNexis PI & Clinical Negligence expert

Practice notes

Responsibility for psychiatric harm partly turns on the character of the injuries sustained and the way they were incurred.

Classifying the victim

Where a claimant suffers both physical and psychiatric harm, even where the bodily injury is slight, they may recover damages in the ordinary way, subject to causation and related matters. In such circumstances there is no separate requirement to show that psychiatric harm was foreseeable if the physical injury itself was foreseeable. Difficulty arises where the claimant has psychiatric injury alone and is otherwise unhurt. For ‘pure’ psychiatric injury following an accident or event, the law distinguishes between:

primary victims—see below
secondary victims—see below

Primary victims

Primary victims are directly engaged in the incident and commonly—but not invariably—sustain physical as well as psychiatric injury. For further guidance, see Practice Note: Psychiatric injury—primary victims.

Establishing liability—common law

To establish liability at common law, a primary victim must demonstrate that it was reasonably foreseeable that a person would suffer physical or psychiatric injury as a result of the defendant’s negligent act...

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Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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