Abstract
In Saadati v. Moorhead, 2017 S.C.C. 28, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that a recognized psychiatric illness was not a prerequisite for compensable mental injury.
Legal Context
The tort of negligence is governed primarily by common law principles. The plaintiff must show:
(1) that the defendant owed him a duty of care; (2) that the defendant's behavior breached the standard of care; (3) that the plaintiff sustained damage; and (4) that the damage was caused, in fact and in law, by the defendant's breach.
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Facts
The appellant was involved in five vehicular accidents between 2003 and 2009. 2 The second of those accidents occurred in 2005, and was occasioned by the respondent. 3 The appellant's truck was severely damaged, but the appellant himself appeared uninjured. 4
Procedural History
In the British Columbia (BC) Supreme Court,
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the trial judge found that the appellant's mental injury was aggravated by his subsequent accident. The court held that:
the mental injury originally caused by the accident was indivisible from any injury caused by that later accident. Having regard to the appellant's personality change, his loss of close personal relationships with family and friends, his age, and the period involved, the trial judge awarded him $100,000 for non‐pecuniary damage. The claim for past income loss was dismissed.
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The BC Court of Appeal overturned this finding. 7 The court held that a mental illness must be demonstrated by “expert medical opinion evidence,” 8 and expressly noted that the Supreme Court's decision in Mustapha v. Culligan of Canada Ltd. had not changed the law in this regard. 9
Analysis
Justice Brown, writing for a unanimous Court, held that a recognized psychiatric illness was never a precondition for compensable mental injury. 10 The traditional reluctance to award damages for mental injury (absent a psychiatric diagnosis) were all founded on dubious social, medical, and legal grounds.
Mental injury was seen as a “product of the imagination,”
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and the law as reluctant to compensate “trivial matters” and to promote “tough hides.”
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The Court emphasized the stigma faced by persons with mental illnesses, and the prejudices perpetuated by the legal system itself:
The stigma faced by people with mental illness, including that caused by mental injury, is notorious … often unjustly and unnecessarily impeding their participation, so far as possible, in civil society. While tort law does not exist to abolish misguided prejudices, it should not seek to perpetuate them. … To put the point more starkly, “[t]he loss of our mental health is a more fundamental violation of our sense of self than the loss of a finger.”
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The Court also questioned the undue reliance on psychiatry to inform the legal concept of damage,
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noting that homosexuality was once considered a psychiatric illness under the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
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(with “ego‐dystonic homosexuality” still being a recognized condition in the World Health Organization's International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems
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). According to Justice Brown:
Rather than fostering objectivity, certainty and predictability of outcomes, then, tethering determinations of legal liability to these iterative diagnostic tools relegates the law of negligence to following a sometimes meandering path as it is cleared by the cutting edge of au courant thinking in modern psychiatry—wherever it may lead, or from wherever it may retreat.
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The Court then allowed the appeal and restored the findings of the trial judge. 18
Practical Significance
The most immediate reaction to the ruling would be the floodgates, especially in terms of casinos' putative liability to problem gamblers. 19 In the absence of a need to prove a recognized psychiatric illness, problem gamblers can seemingly claim for grief, non‐clinical depression, fear, and the entire gambit of mental injuries that accompany claims against casinos for losses and injuries suffered by problem gamblers.
However, concerns over illegitimate claims for mental injury can all be dealt with within the traditional negligence analysis. Is the mental injury claimed too remote? Was there sufficient proximity between the parties? Did the defendant cause the mental injury? As the Court put it, a “robust” application of the traditional elements of negligence would help weed out unfounded claims. According to Justice Brown:
robust application of the elements of the cause of action of negligence should also be sufficient to address concerns for indeterminate liability. In particular, liability for mental injury must be confined to claims which satisfy the proximity analysis within the duty of care framework, which focuses on the relationship between the parties (Cooper, at para. 30), and the remoteness inquiry, which asks whether “the harm [is] too unrelated to the wrongful conduct to hold the defendant fairly liable” (Mustapha, at para. 12, quoting Linden and Feldthusen, at p. 360). We have been given no reason to suppose that the same sort of constraints which negligence law imposes upon claimants alleging physical injury would be less effective in weeding out unworthy claims for mental injury. It is therefore not only undesirable, but unnecessary to distort negligence law by applying the mechanism of a diagnostic threshold for proving mental injury.
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The trier of fact would also be well‐placed to assess matters of credibility and exaggerated or false claims. 21
Although the ruling may be seen as a change in the law to some practitioners, the Supreme Court clearly did not see it that way. 22 In the end, it is a welcome reaffirmation of the devastating and crippling effects of mental injuries. Injuries that, if sufficiently proximate and foreseeable, 23 should be compensable at law.