Another part of your personal injury claim is the way your injuries affect your daily life including your pain and suffering. Personal injury victims are entitled to recover damages for past and present suffering as well as any pain and suffering they may experience in the future. These damages for pain and suffering are different types of damages than those you would claim for your economic losses or physical injuries. For example, someone who suffers chronic pain after an injury is entitled to be compensated for that pain and suffering.

Pain and suffering are not the same. Physical pain is a sensation and suffering is a mood. Pain is the awareness, through a stimulus in the brain, or something that could damage your tissues and is followed by a feeling of discomfort or unpleasantness. By contrast, suffering is an emotion that is considered the opposite of happiness or enjoyment, and involves cognitive awareness of an unpleasant situation, or a lack of the pleasure the victim could have expected had it not been for the accident. Suffering may involve many emotions, including depression, anxiety and humiliation. For example, embarrassment and anxiety may result from a disfiguring facial injury, an amputation, incontinence, paralysis or another injury that severely affects a person’s quality of life.

It is the job of an experienced personal injury lawyer to help you prove specifically how your injuries have affected your life and your family. The ultimate goal of a personal injury claim is to obtain the maximum possible compensation, so you may return to your life as it was before the accident. Although injuries make that impossible in some cases, you are entitled to seek compensation for every injury you suffer. It is the goal of a personal injury lawyer to help you obtain the fullest and fairest compensation permitted by the law.