This chapter discusses the duties of care in negligence that must be pleaded where the claimant has suffered some kind of personal injury—principally cases of bodily injury and psychiatric illness. The law imposes a wide duty with respect to persons who are physically proximate and vulnerable to injury. The law imposes a wide duty of care also upon persons who imperil others’ physical safety and cause them, as persons in the ‘zone of danger’, to suffer psychiatric illness. By contrast, the law has imposed certain ‘control mechanisms’ on the duty of care as it applies to secondary victims (who were outside the zone of danger but have suffered psychiatric injury). These mechanisms involve stringent types of proximity (as to relationships, presence, and sensory experience) in addition to the requirement of foreseeability to persons of the type of psychiatric illness.
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3. Duty of care II: bodily injury and psychiatric illness
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7. Negligence: Duty of Care—Psychiatric Illness
Donal Nolan and Ken Oliphant
This chapter examines liability for psychiatric illness in negligence, and in particular the limits that are placed on claims for such illness at the duty of care stage. It considers liability to a person who was involved as a participant in the traumatic event (‘primary victim’ cases); liability to a person who witnessed the death, injury or imperilment of a third party (‘secondary victim’ cases); and other types of case, such as illness caused by stress at work. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of the current law in this area and a consideration of proposals that have been made for its reform.
