The judgment is narrower and, for practitioners, more useful than that. It explains why the restrictive principles governing recovery for pure psychiatric injury did not apply where the plaintiff had also suffered physical injuries in the collision.

It also draws an important distinction between a pre-existing vulnerability, an existing psychiatric illness and later independent events which prolong or exacerbate the plaintiff’s condition.

The court accepted that the accident was a cause of the plaintiff’s psychiatric injury. It did not accept that everything that happened to her over the following six years was therefore attributable to the defendant.

What the High Court decided in Sykula

Katarzyna Sykula was involved in a rear-end collision near traffic lights in Finglas on 9 December 2017.

She was wearing a seat belt and the airbags did not deploy. An ambulance happened to be passing and stopped, but she did not initially believe that she required assistance. Later that day, she became unwell and attended CareDoc. She was referred to University Hospital Waterford the following day and diagnosed with soft-tissue injuries to her neck, shoulder and right arm.

She subsequently complained of neck, shoulder and lower-back pain, headaches, disturbed sleep, flashbacks, anxiety and low mood.

The defendant’s insurers accepted liability and the proceedings came before the High Court as an assessment of damages. The disputed issues included whether the accident had caused the plaintiff’s psychiatric condition and the extent to which her continuing physical and psychological symptoms were properly attributable to it.

Dr Catherine Corby, consultant psychiatrist, assessed the plaintiff in November 2023, almost six years after the collision. Her opinion was that the plaintiff’s symptoms were consistent with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder under DSM-V.

Dr Corby accepted that the plaintiff’s psychiatric difficulties were multifactorial and that it would be implausible to attribute all of her difficulties in 2023 to the accident.

Mr Justice Cian Ferriter nevertheless accepted that the accident had caused recognisable psychiatric injury. He assessed the plaintiff’s psychiatric symptoms over the relevant period as mild to moderate PTSD, while reducing the damages attributable to the accident by 50 per cent to reflect significant external contributing and exacerbating factors.

The plaintiff was awarded €65,000 in general damages. Agreed special damages and loss of earnings of €25,000 brought the total award to €90,000. The judgment was delivered on 21 November 2025 and is reported as [2025] IEHC 638.

Why Kelly v Hennessy did not govern the claim

The defendant submitted in writing that the plaintiff could not recover damages for her PTSD-type symptoms because she did not satisfy the criteria associated with Kelly v Hennessy [1995] 3 IR 253 and the later Court of Appeal decision in Harford v ESB [2022] 2 IR 541.

The collision was relatively minor. It had not exposed the plaintiff to actual or threatened death or serious injury and could not objectively be described as a terrifying or horrifying event.

That submission was not pressed in oral argument, and Ferriter J considered it misplaced.

The Kelly v Hennessy line of authority concerns claims for recognisable psychiatric illness unaccompanied by physical injury. The requirement for a sudden shocking or horrifying event is one of the control mechanisms applied to claims for purely psychiatric injury.

That was not the claim before the court in Sykula.

The plaintiff had suffered physical injuries to her neck, shoulder and lower back. The anxiety, depression and symptoms consistent with PTSD occurred in conjunction with those injuries.

The court did not decide that this relatively modest collision somehow satisfied the restrictive Kelly criteria. It held that the plaintiff did not have to satisfy them.

Once some form of personal injury was reasonably foreseeable, the fact that this particular plaintiff suffered physical and psychiatric consequences considerably greater than might ordinarily have been expected did not relieve the defendant of liability.

The distinction matters. The control mechanisms applicable to pure psychiatric injury should not automatically be imported into an ordinary accident claim merely because the psychiatric consequences ultimately become more significant than the physical injuries.

Vulnerability was not the same as an existing illness

The plaintiff had a relevant pre-accident history.

Her mother died in March 2015 and her father died later that year. She had also experienced serious workplace difficulties. Her GP records documented an adjustment disorder, anxiety, depressive symptoms, counselling and medication during 2015 and 2016.

There was some confusion as to when she stopped taking Seroxat, but the court accepted that she had discontinued it by April 2017. She received a once-off prescription for Xanax in August 2017, in the context of commencing a new job, but Ferriter J did not consider that prescription to be evidence of an existing psychiatric illness in December 2017.

The court accepted that she had resolved the difficulties in her previous employment, was enjoying her new role as a pharmacy assistant and had been relatively well for a prolonged period before the collision.

Dr Corby’s evidence was that the plaintiff remained vulnerable to psychiatric illness but was not suffering from psychiatric illness when the accident occurred. Ferriter J found that evidence persuasive

That distinction was central to the outcome.

Previous anxiety, depression, counselling or medication does not automatically demonstrate that a later psychiatric condition was already present. The proper inquiry concerns the plaintiff’s actual condition immediately before the accident, whether an earlier episode had resolved and what the evidence indicates would probably have happened without the defendant’s wrongdoing.

The plaintiff was, in the language of the judgment, a poor candidate for the accident because of her psychological vulnerability. The eggshell-skull principle nevertheless required the defendant to take her as she was found.

Applying Walsh v Tipperary County Council [2011] IEHC 503 and Fletcher v Commissioner of Public Works [2003] 1 IR 465, the unexpected severity of her reaction did not defeat recovery once personal injury arising from negligent driving was foreseeable.

The accident did not have to explain every later symptom

The court was satisfied that, but for the accident, the plaintiff would not have suffered anxiety, depression and symptoms consistent with PTSD from January 2018 onwards.

That finding did not make the defendant responsible for every later deterioration in her mental health.

A series of substantial events occurred during the six years between the collision and the trial.

The plaintiff moved from Carlow town to Tullow at the end of 2019 because of accommodation pressures. She experienced social isolation associated with the Covid-19 restrictions. She was involved in stressful litigation arising from the breakdown of her relationship, which did not conclude until 2020.

Of particular significance, she fell into rent arrears in December 2022. Her landlord decided to sell the property, and she and her daughter became homeless in March 2023. They then spent six months in emergency hostel accommodation immediately before the plaintiff’s assessment by Dr Corby.

Dr Corby considered that the plaintiff’s condition had deteriorated significantly during that period.

Ferriter J found that these events were not caused by the accident or its fallout. They nevertheless contributed materially to the duration and severity of the plaintiff’s psychiatric symptoms.

The court rejected the proposition that the intervening events broke the chain of causation so completely that the plaintiff should recover nothing for psychiatric injury.

Instead, the court reduced the damages to reflect the competing causes.

Ferriter J expressly acknowledged that the allocation could not be approached on a mathematical basis. On the evidence as a whole, however, he considered it fair to assess damages on the basis that 50 per cent of the plaintiff’s psychiatric symptoms between the accident and the trial were attributable to the collision and the balance to the identified external factors.

The percentage was therefore a fact-specific evaluative judgment. It should not be treated as a general formula for cases involving multiple psychiatric stressors.

How the damages were calculated

The psychiatric injury was identified as the plaintiff’s most significant injury.

On the pre-Guidelines basis applicable to the case, the court assessed six years of mild to moderate PTSD at €50,000 for past suffering and €10,000 for future suffering.

The future figure reflected Dr Corby’s opinion that, with appropriate support, the plaintiff should be capable of returning to work and that her symptoms should resolve within one to two years.

The €60,000 psychiatric assessment was reduced by 50 per cent to account for the external contributing and exacerbating factors not attributable to the accident. That produced an award of €30,000 for psychiatric injury stemming from the collision.

Applying the multiple-injury approach discussed in Meehan v Shawcove [2022] IECA 208, the court then uplifted the figure by €35,000 for the plaintiff’s neck, shoulder and back injuries.

The physical-injury uplift comprised €30,000 for past suffering and €5,000 for future suffering. The court took account of the fact that the physical injuries were at the lower end of the moderate scale, the plaintiff’s tendency to overstate her symptoms, the interaction between the physical and psychiatric injuries and the temporal overlap between the neck and back complaints.

Standing back and considering the award holistically, the court fixed general damages at €65,000. With agreed special damages and loss of earnings, the total award was €90,000.

Credibility mattered, but was not decisive

The plaintiff’s evidence was not accepted without reservation.

Ferriter J found her generally credible and considered her account broadly consistent with the medical records and reports. He nevertheless found that she was inclined to overstate the severity of her symptoms.

Her failure to disclose her relevant previous psychiatric history in response to a request for particulars until shortly before trial was described as distinctly unimpressive.

The court also regarded her attendance at a gym for up to a year after the accident as inconsistent with the level of physical discomfort she had described. The orthopaedic evidence identified a mismatch between aspects of her reported disability and her clinical presentation.

Those findings affected the court’s evaluation of the evidence and the amount of the award.

They did not lead to the conclusion that no genuine injury had occurred.

It had not been put to the plaintiff that she had fabricated her symptoms or deliberately misled her treating professionals. The thrust of the defence case was that the bulk of her problems was not properly referable to the accident.

The psychiatric evidence also requires emphasis. Dr Corby was not challenged on the basis that the six-year interval prevented her from expressing a proper expert opinion, and no contrary psychiatric evidence was called by the defendant.

Sykula is therefore not a section 26 decision and should not be treated as authority on the statutory threshold for dismissing an action based on false or misleading evidence.

Its narrower lesson is that exaggeration, incomplete disclosure and other credibility difficulties may reduce the weight given to a plaintiff’s account and affect quantum without necessarily extinguishing an injury established by the wider evidence.

What Sykula clarifies

The judgment provides several useful propositions for psychiatric injury litigation:

• The restrictive Kelly v Hennessy control mechanisms concern pure psychiatric injury and did not govern a case in which the psychiatric condition accompanied physical injury.
• A prior history of anxiety, depression or medication does not, without more, establish that the plaintiff was suffering from an existing psychiatric illness when the accident occurred.
• Psychological vulnerability may explain why an apparently modest accident produced an unusually serious reaction without defeating legal causation.
• Establishing that the accident was a but-for cause does not make the defendant responsible for every later deterioration in the plaintiff’s condition.
• Later independent stressors may justify a substantial reduction in damages without completely breaking the chain of causation.
• Credibility concerns may affect the assessment of symptoms and quantum without necessarily defeating a claim supported by contemporaneous and expert medical evidence.
• In a multiple-injury case, the court should identify the most significant injury, add an appropriate uplift for the remaining injuries and then assess the proportionality of the overall figure.

What remains fact-sensitive

Sykula does not supply a general tariff or causation formula for psychiatric injury following a minor collision.

Important matters will continue to depend on the evidence in each case:

• whether the plaintiff’s earlier psychiatric condition had genuinely resolved before the accident;
• whether later employment, housing, financial or family difficulties were independent events or consequences of the accident and resulting disability;
• the extent to which an expert can reliably attribute symptoms where the psychiatric assessment occurs years after the accident;
• the effect of late disclosure or a late amendment introducing psychiatric injury;
• the weight to be attached to expert evidence where competing psychiatric evidence is called; and
• the appropriate valuation of a comparable injury under the Personal Injuries Guidelines, given that Sykula was assessed on a pre-Guidelines basis.

The 50 per cent division in Sykula should therefore be understood as an assessment of this plaintiff’s evidence rather than a precedent for routinely dividing multifactorial psychiatric injuries in half.

The practical evidential lesson

Psychiatric injury claims require a chronology, not merely a diagnosis.

Relevant material may include:

• complete pre-accident and post-accident GP records;
• prescription and pharmacy records showing when medication commenced and ceased;
• counselling, psychology and psychiatric records;
• evidence of the plaintiff’s functioning immediately before the accident;
• contemporaneous reports of anxiety, sleep disturbance, driving fear, flashbacks or low mood;
• employment records, sick certificates and occupational-health material;
• records relating to later bereavement, relationship, housing, financial or employment stressors;
• pleadings and replies to particulars accurately disclosing previous psychiatric treatment;
• expert evidence distinguishing vulnerability, accident-related injury and subsequent exacerbation; and
• a reasoned prognosis addressing treatment, likely recovery and return to work.

The expert should not be asked simply whether the plaintiff now meets the criteria for PTSD, anxiety or depression.

The more useful questions are what condition existed immediately before the accident, what changed afterwards, which symptoms were caused by the collision, what later events prolonged or worsened them and what the probable course would have been if those later events had not occurred.

Contemporaneous accident and medical evidence also remains important. A practical guide to preserving photographs, witness details, medical records and loss documents following a road traffic accident is available on injured.ie.

Conclusion

Sykula does not establish that a minor collision will routinely support a substantial psychiatric injury award.

It confirms that a person may be vulnerable to psychiatric illness without already suffering from the condition later caused by an accident.

It also confirms that the restrictive principles governing pure psychiatric injury do not necessarily apply where the psychiatric injury accompanies physical injuries sustained in the same event.

The eggshell-skull principle may require a defendant to compensate an unexpectedly serious reaction. It does not, however, make the defendant responsible for every deterioration caused by independent events occurring during the following years.

The most useful question in a psychiatric injury case may therefore be broader than: “Does the plaintiff now have PTSD?”

What was the plaintiff’s condition immediately before the accident, what injury did the accident cause, what happened afterwards - and what evidence permits the court to distinguish between them?

This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice.

Dalippe Lalloo is principal of Lalloo Solicitors in Dublin