‘Recognisable Psychiatric Injury’ and Tortious Compensability for Pure Mental Harm Claims in Negligence<i>Saadati v Moorhead</i> [2017] 1 SCR 543(McLachlin CJ and Abella, Moldaver, Karakatsanis, Wagner, Gascon, Côté, Brown and Rowe JJ)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since at least 1970, one of the constraints upon compensability for pure mental harm at common law has been that a plaintiff must have suffered not just adverse psychological consequences from negligence but a ‘recognisable psychiatric illness’. In a powerful unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of Canada in Saadati v Moorhead [2017] 1 SCR 543 has controversially removed this requirement. This paper reviews the reasoning in the decision and considers its ramifications, concluding that while it is likely to extend the liability of defendants, this will occur only in a small cross-section of cases where a plaintiff exhibits significant symptomatology of a mental disorder albeit falling short of sufficient for an unequivocal diagnosis within the meaning DSM-5 or ICD-10. It notes that in the post-Ipp reforms in Australia, a ‘recognised psychiatric illness’ has been statutorily enshrined as a prerequisite to recovery by plaintiffs, so statutory law reform would be required to implement the Saadati decision. While it welcomes the contribution of the Saadati approach to reducing the law’s discrimination against mental (as opposed to physical) injuries, it calls for close scrutiny of the actual effects of the Saadati decision.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".