Psychiatry Punishment Case Study

This essay evaluates the statement above by firstly explaining the difference between primary and secondary victims and secondly by identifying the essential elements of a claim for psychiatry injury. Following, is an evaluation of the effectiveness of the current set of rules dealing with psychiatry injury and the proposed reform to the aforementioned rules.

Lady Justice Hale in Hatton v Sutherland [2002] EWCA Civ 76 states that “Where psychiatric harm is suffered, the law distinguishes between “primary” and “secondary” victims. Such distinction is set out in Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire [1992] 1 AC 310. Lord Oliver points out primary victims as those involved 'mediately or immediately as a participant ' and, secondary victims

The House of Lords in Page v Smith [1996] 1 AC 155 held that provided some kind of injury was foreseeable it did not matter whether the injury was physical or psychiatric.
Secondary victims must meet the following ‘Alcock criteria’ in order to succeed in a claim for pure psychiatric harm; prove a close tie of love and affection to a primary victim; have witnessed the event with their own unaided senses; have been next to the event or its immediate aftermath and; the psychiatric injury must have been caused by a shocking event. The latter is pointed in Steele, J. (2014) as a control device to prevent a ‘floodgate’ of claims from people who are too remote from the incident. Secondary victims can recover only if their psychiatric injuries were foreseeable in a person of "ordinary fortitude", a legal construction that seems imprecise and sometimes difficult to

The reasoning followed was that he was in the area of danger and so it was foreseeable that he could suffer physical harm, namely, the wrecked carriage could have fallen on him. In the article ‘The Page v Smith saga: A tale of inauspicious origins and unintended consequences’, it is said that the decision in Page could have an expansionary effect. This effect is verified in Young v Charles Church (Southern) Ltd (1998) 39 BMLR 146 where a claim was successfully made for psychiatric harm suffered by watching the death of a work colleague. As the claimant was himself in the danger zone, he was also treated as a primary victim.

However, the definition of primary victim given in Page might also be treated as exhaustive and, its effect could be restrictive in the sense that involuntary actors would not be able to bring a claim forward because they would be treated as secondary victims (The Open University, 2016a).

The contradictory outcomes of cases presenting very similar facts to the court leads some jurists to cry out for reform and to denounce the defects in the present common law rules. Some, are supportive of the implementation of a statutory obligation to make reparation for wrongfully caused mental