Is assault resulting in PTSD considered as causing serious harm?

Question

Is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (or Complex PTSD) treated as an injury, serious injury or life-changing injury in cases of assault ?

I am interested in answers from any jurisdiction.

In response to a comment : I am interested in whether or not, or to what extent, the effect of PTSD can be included as an injury due to the assault, not if it would be an additional charge (although if that's the case anywhere I'd like to know).

I am primarily interested in criminal law, although points of note in civil law would be of interest as well.

Motivation

I'm trying to gather information on how PTSD/C-PTSD is viewed in terms of injury to a victim in different jurisdictions.

From my perspective causing PTSD/C-PTSD is equivalent to causing a permanent disability.

Many years ago I was a victim of an assault and break-in which resulted in (thankfully) minor physical injuries but caused severe Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). PTSD and C-PTSD are life changing disorders which have an impact similar to a severe disability in many ways. In Ireland they're treated as a disability for the purposes of Welfare allowance.

However the court case, long past, did not mention my C-PTSD and while there was a guilty verdict, it is clear that, in my case, PTSD was not considered as equivalent to e.g. the effect of gross bodily harm or causing a disability to the victim.

My C-PTSD was diagnosed long before the court case and within a month of the assault. There would have been ample time to list it as a result of the assault on e.g. a formal charge document.

I'm Irish and the assault I describe happened in Ireland, so a similar legal system to the UK. I am, however, interested in how this is treated in jurisdictions.

Answer 1

Yes

new-south-wales

Assault that results in actual or grievous bodily harm attract progressively more severe punishments than assaults that don’t. The case law recognises psychological injury as bodily harm.

Answer 2

france Yes, both for civil and criminal law, but in different ways.

The general principle of civil law in France (and I believe every civil-legal-system jurisdiction) is that one is liable for any damage they cause through fault. Of course, details differ greatly between what is considered a damage, what are the standards to prove causation or fault, etc.

Cour de cassation, civile, Chambre civile 2, 18 janvier 2018, 16-28.392 specifically endorsed a lower court reasoning that distinguished between préjudice moral (moral damage) and préjudice psychologique (psychological damage). The latter is about quantifiable medical damage (even if mental rather than physical), while the former covers grave breaches of wellbeing. In the case at hand, a couple was assassinated when their child was two years old; the child later developed severe psychic disorders as a result of the trauma; it was found that a compensation for the préjudice moral of losing his parents at a young age did not foreclose a later suit for the préjudice psychologique of developing mental troubles (which became visible much later in his life).

To be honest, I would be extremely surprised if any jurisdiction recognized no cause of action for any type of psychological damage. There might be issues of burden of proof etc. such that in practice suing for psychological damage is unviable, but a complete bar on any civil action predicated on psychic damage seems unthinkable.

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Regarding criminal law, many assault-type crimes are scaled by gravity. That gravity is evaluated by days of "complete inability to work" (search incapacité totale de travail through that section of the penal code). While the notion has been standardized by work law cases, it also applies outside a work context when the damage prevents one from doing basic life actions (children, retirees or the unemployed can be subject to a "complete inability to work"). Whether the damage that caused it was physical or mental is irrelevant.

Two notes though:

• physical damage resulting from assault is more easily quantified by that scale than mental damage. If a mob boss breaks your bones, you spend one month in the hospital, and then you get out roughly healed; it’s easy to say that it cost you one month of your life. If the same mob boss kills your wife in a gruesome manner, you might be haunted for life, but still be able to work, feed yourself etc., past one or two days of shock. "Low-level", long-lasting damage is not well-measured that way.
• quantifying the duration of a "complete inability to work" depends on the victim’s active cooperation with the prosecution (such as going to see a doctor to get a certificate). That is possible because the civil and criminal causes of actions are usually joined in a single trial, during which the victim will try to prove injury. (It is possible for the victim to open a separate civil trial, but that’s usually not a good idea. The same exact remedies are available by joining in the criminal trial; usually the prosecutor has the same goals as you in proving the facts, so why not let them do it and save some lawyer fees?) It would probably not be reasonable in a common-law system with separate trials. It also breaks down in certain cases (e.g.: in a good fraction of spousal abuse cases, the victim refuses to testify against the accused).

Answer 3

united-states

I am not aware of any such statute. Often, assault crimes are graded between those that result in merely "bodily injury" and those that result in "serious bodily injury."

Sometimes there are offense enhancers for assaults on children, pregnant women, or "at risk" individuals (such as elderly people), and for assaults on law enforcement and other first responders.

If an assault occurs in the course of a robbery, burglary, kidnapping, or rape, the assault is often a sentencing enhancer for those crimes.

In some cases, conduct giving rise to a criminal charge of assault would also give rise to a criminal charge of "menacing" which is similar to the common law crime and tort of "assault". Modern terminology in statutes frequently refers to the common law crime and tort of "battery" as "assault", even though the common law meaning of the word was to place someone in apprehension of imminent battery rather than meaning battery itself.

But, psychological impact, such as PTSD, is not normally not considered in determining is serious injury, often specifically defined as "seriously bodily injury" has occurred.

This said, typically, an offense of conviction involves a range of possible punishments decided upon in a post-conviction sentencing hearing. At such a hearing, the impact of the crime on the victim, including a PTSD impact, would frequently be presented as an aggravating factor to guide the sentencing decision within the allowed range of sentences for an offense.

So, for example, a simple assault resulted in PTSD for the victim of the assault, and the permissible sentencing range for the offenses was 1 day to 2 years of incarceration, evidence that the assault had severe psychological consequences, despite resulting in only modest bodily harm, would argue for a sentence towards the high end of the allowed range of sentences.