A client tells you the crash changed everything. They don't sleep. They snap at their kids. They've stopped doing the things that used to make them feel like themselves. You believe them. The harder question is whether a court will, and what it takes to get there.
For a long time, the path ran through a diagnosis. You needed a recognized psychiatric condition, named and labelled, before a court would put a dollar figure on psychological harm. That changed in 2017, when the Supreme Court of Canada decided Saadati v. Moorhead. But it's widely misread - and the misreading is where files come apart.
Mr. Saadati was a truck driver involved in a string of collisions. He couldn't produce a tidy psychiatric label for the mental harm he said one of the crashes had caused. The trial judge awarded him $100,000 anyway, relying largely on the testimony of family and friends who described how much he had changed after the accident. The case went up to the Supreme Court, and the Court upheld the award.
Here's the part people get wrong. Saadati didn't lower the bar. It moved it. The Court didn't say psychological injury is easier to prove - it said you prove a different thing. Not a diagnosis from a textbook, but the harm itself: in the Court's words, "a serious and prolonged disturbance that rises above the ordinary annoyances, anxieties and fears" of everyday life.
That's a subtler thing to establish, not a simpler one. A diagnosis is a label a clinician can hand you. A serious and prolonged disturbance is something you have to show - how deep it runs, how long it's lasted, how it's reshaped an ordinary life, and that this event is what caused it. So while the headline reads like a win for plaintiffs, what Saadati really did was shift the work from naming the injury to evidencing it. And evidencing it well is where a lot of otherwise strong claims quietly fall apart.
If lay evidence can carry a mental injury claim, the tempting conclusion is that you can skip the expert and save your client the cost. The Ontario Court of Appeal closed that door in Bothwell v. London Health Sciences Centre.
Expert evidence isn't strictly required, the Court confirmed. But plaintiffs who don't bring it, in the Court's phrasing, run a real risk of being found to have fallen short. Bothwell drew a hard line between injury and upset. The plaintiff was angry and frustrated after a serious medication error, and understandably so. But anger and frustration, on their own, are psychological upset, not psychological injury. There is, as the courts have put it, no legal right to happiness. The disturbance has to be serious. It has to be prolonged. And someone has to show the court the difference.
That "someone" is usually an expert.
A good trauma-informed psychiatric or psychological assessment does more than confirm your client is suffering. It builds the record the threshold demands:
Timing matters as much as quality. An assessment carried out close to the events, by a clinician who documents not just a list of symptoms but how those symptoms show up in the person's actual day, gives you something a late or thin report never can - a detailed, contemporaneous picture that's genuinely hard to dislodge.
The cap on general damages, set at roughly $100,000 by the Supreme Court in 1978, now sits near $470,000 once you adjust for inflation. Serious psychological injury claims are worth real money, which is exactly why they are fought hard. A claim resting on nothing but "my client felt awful" - even when every word of it is true - is a claim that can be picked apart.
Two things can be true at once, and legal counsel need to hold both:
The threshold the courts have set isn't high in theory, but it's specific, and it rewards evidence that's been built with care. That's what a strong assessment gives you: not just an opinion that your client was hurt, but a clear, defensible account of how seriously, for how long, and why. When the injury is invisible, that account is often the case.
If you're building a claim that turns on psychological injury, we'd be glad to talk about how a trauma-informed MindSense assessment can support it.