Can I Sue for the Trauma of Watching Someone I Love Get Hurt in Massachusetts?

Sometimes, and Massachusetts is stricter about it than most people expect. The claim is called negligent infliction of emotional distress, and since Dziokonski v. Babineau, 375 Mass. 555 (1978) it has not required that you were hit, touched, or even in danger yourself. What it does require is a genuine injury you can corroborate with something more than grief, and, if you are claiming as a bystander to someone else’s accident, three limits that decide most of these cases before anyone argues about damages: you have to be closely related to the person who was hurt, you have to have witnessed the accident or come upon the scene soon after, and you have to have been there rather than hearing about it. A stranger who stops and performs CPR has no claim in Massachusetts. A mother who was telephoned seven hours later had none either. A mother who reached the scene and saw her daughter lying in the road did. To talk through a specific situation, the Jim Glaser Law line at (617) JIM-WINS is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

Two Different People Bring This Claim

The phrase covers two situations that the law treats quite differently, and mixing them up is the source of most of the confusion online.

The first is the person who was endangered or hurt themselves. If a defendant’s negligence put you in physical peril and the fright caused you real harm, Massachusetts has allowed recovery for a very long time, and the rules are not exotic. Cimino v. Milford Keg, Inc., 385 Mass. 323 (1982) is a clean example: a father standing in the path of the same car that struck his son was, in the court’s words, “himself indisputably in danger of being hit”, and the court treated that as ordinary law rather than an extension of anything. Cimino was also a dram shop case against the bar that had served the driver, which is the subject of the article on who can be held responsible after a drunk driving crash.

The second is the bystander, and that is the situation this article is mostly about. Here the defendant’s negligence was aimed at somebody else. You were never going to be hit. What happened to you happened because of what you saw, and Massachusetts spent most of the twentieth century refusing to compensate it at all.

The Rule Massachusetts Threw Out, and What Replaced It

For eighty-one years the answer was no. Under Spade v. Lynn & Boston R.R., 168 Mass. 285 (1897), physical injuries arising purely from negligently caused fright were not recoverable, and the court was candid that the rule was a practical fence rather than a principle. Dziokonski tore it down.

The facts of Dziokonski are worth knowing because they still mark the boundary. A child was injured near her school, on foot, in the situation covered by the article on pedestrian accident rights in Massachusetts. Her mother went to the scene, saw her daughter lying injured, and died on the way to the hospital. The father learned of both the injury and his wife’s death by some route the record never made clear. The Supreme Judicial Court held that the mother’s complaint stated a claim, and that the father’s was too vague to dismiss but too vague to endorse.

The court set two hard requirements and then a list of factors. The hard requirements were that “there must be both a substantial physical injury and proof that the injury was caused by the defendant’s negligence”. Beyond that, whether liability attaches depends on where, when and how the third person’s injury entered the claimant’s consciousness, and on the degree of familial or other relationship between them. The holding itself is narrower than the discussion: a parent states a claim “where the parent either witnesses the accident or soon comes on the scene while the child is still there”.

Dziokonski also rejected the tidier alternative on purpose. Many states limit these claims to plaintiffs inside the “zone of danger”, meaning people who might themselves have been struck. Massachusetts considered that test and found it beside the point, because whether a parent is traumatized by harm to their child has nothing to do with whether the parent was standing close enough to be hit. The court chose reasonable foreseeability instead, saying that “reasonable foreseeability is a proper starting point in determining whether an actor is to be liable for the consequences of his negligence”, and then spent the next four decades building fences around it.

What You Actually Have to Prove

Four years after Dziokonski, in Payton v. Abbott Labs, 386 Mass. 540 (1982), the court reduced the tort to five elements that Massachusetts courts still recite today. A plaintiff must prove “(1) negligence; (2) emotional distress; (3) causation; (4) physical harm manifested by objective symptomatology; and (5) that a reasonable person would have suffered emotional distress under the circumstances of the case”.

Element four is where these cases live or die, and it is also the element that has changed since 1982. As Payton originally put it, “the physical harm must be manifested by objective symptomatology and substantiated by expert medical testimony”. Read literally, that meant no doctor, no case.

That is no longer the rule, and a page that tells you otherwise is quoting a superseded sentence. In Sullivan v. Boston Gas Co., 414 Mass. 129 (1993), the court looked at plaintiffs who had watched their home destroyed in a gas explosion and were suffering headaches, sleeplessness, nightmares, gastrointestinal trouble and depression, and it declined to sort those symptoms into physical and mental piles. Judges are not doctors, the court reasoned, and modern medicine does not draw the line where the old rule assumed it did. What matters instead is corroboration. Plaintiffs must “corroborate their mental distress claims with enough objective evidence of harm to convince a judge that their claims present a sufficient likelihood of genuineness to go to trial”. On expert testimony the court was explicit and measured: “Expert medical testimony may be needed to make this showing.” And when it is offered, “Medical experts, however, need not have observed an actual, external sign of physical deterioration.”

The floor that survived all of this is stated in one sentence the defense will quote at you. A claim must do more than allege “mere upset, dismay, humiliation, grief and anger”. Bereavement is not the injury. Something that a doctor, a treatment record, a pharmacy history or a documented course of symptoms can stand behind is.

The Contradiction in the Reports, Stated Honestly

There is a genuine inconsistency in how the Supreme Judicial Court has described what Sullivan did, and it is easier to hand you the two sentences than to pretend they agree.

In Migliori v. Airborne Freight Corp., 426 Mass. 629 (1998), the court wrote that in Sullivan it had abandoned the so-called physical harm rule, and that “While no longer considering attendant physical harm as a necessary condition of a cognizable claim for the negligent infliction of emotional injuries”, objective corroboration was still required. Four years later, in Gutierrez v. Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, 437 Mass. 396 (2002), the court wrote the opposite framing: “We did not eliminate the physical harm requirement, but merely expanded the range of symptoms that may provide the type of objective evidence to prove physical harm”.

Rodriguez v. Cambridge Housing Authority, 443 Mass. 697 (2005), the most recent full synthesis, sets the two passages next to each other and marks the second with a “Contrast” signal rather than reconciling them. In practice the difference rarely decides a case, because both versions demand the same thing of a plaintiff: objective evidence, not just testimony about feelings. But anyone telling you Massachusetts law on this point is tidy has not read the reports.

The Three Fences Around a Bystander Claim

Migliori is the case that states the bystander rule in a single sentence, and it is the sentence to memorize: “Only a bystander plaintiff who is closely related to a third person directly injured by a defendant’s tortious conduct, and suffers emotional injuries as the result of witnessing the accident or coming upon the third person soon after the accident, states a claim for which relief may be granted.”

The court described what it had built as three limits, saying that “We have imposed relational, temporal, and spatial limits on the scope of liability for emotional harm”. They are worth separating.

Relational. You must be closely related to the person who was hurt. Massachusetts has never drawn the exact line, which is dealt with below.

Temporal. The shock must follow closely on the accident. This is not the same as witnessing it. In Ferriter v. Daniel O’Connell’s Sons, 381 Mass. 507 (1980), a family first saw an injured worker at the hospital, and the court allowed the claim, reasoning that a “plaintiff who rushes onto the accident scene and finds a loved one injured has no greater entitlement to compensation for that shock than a plaintiff who rushes instead to the hospital”, because “So long as the shock follows closely on the heels of the accident, the two types of injury are equally foreseeable.”

Spatial. You have to have been there, in the sense of perceiving the aftermath yourself rather than receiving a report of it. This is the fence that catches the largest number of real families, because most people learn about a serious crash by telephone.

What Has Cleared the Line and What Has Not

The reported cases are unusually concrete, which makes this one of the few areas of injury law where you can compare your own facts against the record.

Cleared it. The mother in Dziokonski, who went to the scene and saw her daughter lying injured. The wife and children in Ferriter, who saw the injured worker at the hospital shortly after the accident. The father in Cimino, who watched his son struck and was in the path himself. In Rodriguez, a son who found his mother in the immediate aftermath of a violent home invasion, still bound and choking, and was hospitalized for seventeen days afterward; the court held that his “claim for emotional distress damages went far beyond alleging mere upset, dismay, and grief.”

Did not clear it. In Cohen v. McDonnell Douglas Corp., 389 Mass. 327 (1983), a mother in Massachusetts was telephoned about her son’s death in an air crash seven hours after it happened, more than a thousand miles away, and suffered angina attacks and died two days later. The court accepted that the distress and the physical harm were real and still refused the claim, holding that “the manner in which she learned of her son’s death precludes the imposition of liability”. Its explanation is the clearest statement of the spatial fence in the reports: “the injury to Nellie Cohen did not result from a sensory perception of the injuries caused to her son or the injury producing event”, so what she suffered was “more akin to the anguish that any person feels after being informed of death or injury to a loved one than it is to the distress, which we have deemed compensable, that involves firsthand observation of a defendant’s negligence or the consequences thereof”.

In Stockdale v. Bird & Son, Inc., 399 Mass. 249 (1987), a mother learned of her son’s death in an industrial accident four hours later and saw his body the next day at a funeral home. She became physically ill, lost sleep and suffered ongoing distress, and she lost, because “since the plaintiff did not learn of the accident until several hours after it occurred and did not see the injuries to her son’s body for twenty-four hours, this case is more like Cohen and Miles than it is like Dziokonski and Ferriter”.

In Miles v. Edward O. Tabor, M.D., Inc., 387 Mass. 783 (1982), described in Stockdale, a mother could not recover where her son died two months after a negligent delivery, because there was not enough evidence that her distress came from watching the doctor’s conduct rather than from the death itself.

And in Barnes v. Geiger, 15 Mass. App. Ct. 365 (1983), a mother saw a car strike a pedestrian near where her children were skating, believed the victim was her thirteen-year-old son, ran to the scene, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage the next day. The victim was not her child. The Appeals Court held that “psychic trauma and resulting physical injury to a person who mistakenly believes a close family member to be the victim of an observed accident is beyond the reasonably foreseeable”, and was unusually frank that drawing the line there was “in fair measure a pragmatic judgment rather than a systematic application of a general principle”.

The uncomfortable thread through the losing cases is that the law is not measuring how much you suffered. Nellie Cohen died. Mrs. Barnes died. Neither claim survived. What the law is measuring is how you came to know.

The Rescuer Who Is Not Family

This is the single most common misconception about the tort, and Massachusetts answered it directly in 1998.

Michael Migliori came upon a woman who had just been struck by a van on Congress Street in Boston. She had no pulse. He gave her CPR, restarted her heart twice, became covered in her blood, and watched the ambulance take her away. She was pronounced dead half an hour later. He had never met her.

The Supreme Judicial Court held he had no claim. Answering a question certified by the federal court, it concluded that “a person who witnesses or comes upon the scene of an accident and voluntarily renders aid to a victim to whom he or she has no familial or other preexisting relationship, does not have a cognizable claim for negligent infliction of emotional distress under Massachusetts law” where the rescue fails, the rescuer suffers severe emotional distress, and that distress leads to physical problems.

The reasoning was about the size of the class, not the worth of the plaintiff. A close relative is a member of a group fixed before the accident happens. A rescuer is not: the category is created by the event itself, and there is no principled way to say whether the neighbor who called 911 from a window belongs in it. Barnes v. Geiger had already gestured at the same problem, observing that “Danger invites rescue; accidents invite onlookers.” and holding that “To achieve the status of a rescuer, a claimant’s purpose must be more than investigatory.”

If you stopped, helped a stranger and cannot sleep since, the honest answer is that Massachusetts negligence law does not compensate that, whatever it ought to do. Whether some other claim fits your particular facts is a different question and a fair one to bring to a lawyer.

The Question Massachusetts Has Never Answered

The relational fence has no marked posts. The Supreme Judicial Court said so in terms in Migliori: “We have had no occasion to decide how closely a person has to be related to a third person directly injured by a tortfeasor in order to have a cognizable cause of action for negligent infliction of emotional distress.”

That was 1998, and nothing read for this article resolves it. Parents, spouses and dependent children are plainly inside on the strength of the decided cases. Grandparents, adult siblings, stepchildren, long-term unmarried partners and fiancees are not addressed by any of the decisions above. Anyone telling you flatly that a Massachusetts grandmother does or does not have a bystander claim is going beyond what the reports say.

One nearby data point is worth naming without overreading it. In the separate tort of loss of consortium, Massachusetts has required actual marriage and enforced that requirement against a couple who had lived together for twenty years, which is covered in the article on whether your family can bring their own claim. That is a different cause of action with a different measure of damages, so it does not decide the emotional distress question. It does suggest the court has not been in an expansive mood about relationships outside marriage and parentage.

When the Person You Watched Get Hurt Dies

Two rules operate here and they are frequently jumbled together.

The first is that damages for the loss of the relationship itself run through the wrongful death statute and nowhere else. M.G.L. c. 229, sec. 2 makes a negligent defendant liable for the fair monetary value of the decedent, expressly including the loss of the “society, companionship, comfort, guidance, counsel, and advice of the decedent”. In Hallett v. Town of Wrentham, 398 Mass. 550 (1986), the court held that the statute “provides the exclusive action for the recovery of the damages it encompasses by the designated beneficiaries”, and dismissed three children’s separate claims for the loss of their father’s society. Those damages belong in one action brought by the executor or administrator. The mechanics are set out in the article on Massachusetts wrongful death claims.

The second is that your own emotional distress claim is not one of those damages. Cimino held the point directly: because “emotional distress is a wrong to the plaintiff distinct from that done to his son and the statutory beneficiaries of the decedent”, “it is not a duplicative remedy” and is not preempted by the wrongful death statute. The court also drew the line that keeps the two from overlapping: “A claim for damages based on emotional distress does not include an administrator’s claim for loss of consortium”.

Cimino also supplied the definition that explains why the two are different in kind. Emotional distress, as Massachusetts has developed it, is a “severe psychological shock directly resulting from experiencing or witnessing the effects of a defendant’s conduct”. It compensates what the witnessing did to you. The death statute compensates what the death took from the family. A person who was present at the scene may have both; a person who was told by telephone has, under Cohen, only the statutory claim through the estate.

If the Injury Happened at Work

This is where a well-meaning citation can hand a family the wrong answer, so it is worth being precise.

Ferriter, cited above for the hospital-arrival rule, also held that the workers compensation act did not bar the family’s claims against the employer. That half of the case did not survive. The Legislature responded with St. 1985, c. 527, and the served text of M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 24 now says it outright. Where an employee has not given written notice preserving common-law rights, the employee’s spouse, children, parents and dependent family members are held to have waived any right “against such employer”, and the statute names the claims it is taking: “including, but not limited to claims for damages due to emotional distress, loss of consortium, parental guidance, companionship or the like”.

Two things follow, and the second one is the important one. A family emotional distress claim against the injured worker’s own employer is generally gone. But the waiver runs only “against such employer”. If somebody other than the employer caused the injury, a subcontractor, a driver, a property owner or an equipment manufacturer, the family’s claim against that party is not inside the waiver at all. Workplace injuries frequently involve exactly such a third party, and the benefits side of the same system is covered in the article on how long workers compensation lasts in Massachusetts.

Deliberate Conduct Is a Different Tort with an Easier Element

If the conduct was intentional or reckless rather than careless, the physical harm element disappears. Agis v. Howard Johnson Co., 371 Mass. 140 (1976), held that “one who, by extreme and outrageous conduct and without privilege, causes severe emotional distress to another is subject to liability for such emotional distress even though no bodily harm may result”.

What replaces it is a much harder standard for the conduct. The plaintiff must show that the defendant intended the distress or knew or should have known it was the likely result, that the conduct was extreme and outrageous, “beyond all possible bounds of decency” and “utterly intolerable in a civilized community”, that the conduct caused the distress, and that the distress was severe and of a nature “that no reasonable man could be expected to endure it”. Ordinary bad driving does not come close. Intentional infliction is the exception that proves the shape of the negligence rule rather than a workaround for it.

The Motor Vehicle Threshold Question Nobody Has Resolved

In most Massachusetts car accident cases, a plaintiff cannot recover pain and suffering unless reasonable and necessary medical expenses exceed $2,000 or one of five statutory exceptions applies. That gate is M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 6D, and it reaches “damages for pain and suffering, including mental suffering associated with such injury, sickness or disease”. How it is applied is set out in the article on the serious injury threshold.

Whether a bystander must clear it independently is genuinely unsettled, and Dziokonski itself raised the question without deciding it. The court noted that section 6D might impose its own restraints on these claims, and said that even if it should not be read as a limitation on recovery for emotionally based physical injuries, “it may provide a reasonable guide in determining whether a physical injury is sufficiently substantial so as to justify recovery for negligently caused, emotionally based physical harm”. That was a suggestion, not a holding, and nothing read for this article resolves it in either direction. A page that tells you confidently which way it comes out is telling you more than the reports do.

The practical consequence is undramatic. A bystander claim that satisfies Dziokonski’s substantial-physical-injury requirement and Payton’s corroboration requirement will usually involve real treatment, and real treatment tends to generate real expense.

Deadlines, and What Actually Proves One of These Claims

The limitations period is the ordinary one. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A provides that “Except as otherwise provided, actions of tort, actions of contract to recover for personal injuries, and actions of replevin, shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues.” The clock, the exceptions and the traps are covered in the article on the Massachusetts personal injury statute of limitations. Cimino is a reminder that the details matter: the emotional distress count there was added after three years had run and survived only because it related back to the original complaint.

What separates the claims that survive summary judgment from the ones that do not is almost always documentation, and almost all of it is generated in the first months.

Get treatment and let the record show what you told a clinician and when. Sullivan’s corroboration standard is satisfied by evidence, and the evidence in these cases is usually a treatment note, a prescription history, a therapist’s chart, or a diagnosis carrying a date. Write down where you were, what you saw and heard, how far away you were standing, how long it took you to reach the scene, and who else was present, because the temporal and spatial fences are questions of fact and nobody reconstructs those details two years later. Keep a plain record of what changed: sleep, appetite, work missed, things you stopped being able to do. Note that the same insurer is evaluating this claim alongside the injured person’s, and the way that evaluation works is covered in the article on dealing with an insurance adjuster. Every version of this claim also depends on proving the defendant was negligent in the first place, and how Massachusetts allocates fault between the people involved in a crash is set out in the article on comparative negligence.

Two things are worth saying plainly at the end. Massachusetts does compensate this injury, which many states still refuse to do at all. And it compensates it inside fences that have nothing to do with how badly you were hurt, which is why the same facts can produce a claim for the parent who arrived in ten minutes and no claim for the parent who was told by phone. If you were there when someone close to you was seriously hurt, a first conversation costs nothing. Jim Glaser Law can be reached at (617) JIM-WINS, and how the firm handles car accident claims is described on the practice page. The first 24 hours after a car accident guide covers the immediate steps, and how a Massachusetts case is valued explains where damages like these sit in a settlement.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can I sue for emotional distress in Massachusetts if I was never physically hurt?

A: Yes, in some circumstances. Since Dziokonski v. Babineau, 375 Mass. 555 (1978), Massachusetts has allowed recovery for negligently inflicted emotional distress even where the plaintiff was never touched and was never in the zone of danger. What the law still requires is corroboration. Under Payton v. Abbott Labs, 386 Mass. 540 (1982), a plaintiff must prove “(1) negligence; (2) emotional distress; (3) causation; (4) physical harm manifested by objective symptomatology; and (5) that a reasonable person would have suffered emotional distress under the circumstances of the case”. A claim must do more than allege “mere upset, dismay, humiliation, grief and anger”.

Q: Do I need a doctor to testify in order to bring an emotional distress claim in Massachusetts?

A: Not necessarily, and this is a point where older summaries are out of date. Payton originally said “the physical harm must be manifested by objective symptomatology and substantiated by expert medical testimony”. Sullivan v. Boston Gas Co., 414 Mass. 129 (1993), relaxed that, holding that plaintiffs must “corroborate their mental distress claims with enough objective evidence of harm to convince a judge that their claims present a sufficient likelihood of genuineness to go to trial”. On expert proof the court said “Expert medical testimony may be needed to make this showing.” and added that “Medical experts, however, need not have observed an actual, external sign of physical deterioration.” Rodriguez v. Cambridge Housing Authority, 443 Mass. 697 (2005), confirms expert testimony is not mandatory.

Q: Do I have to have actually seen the accident happen?

A: No, but you have to have been close to it in time and place. Migliori v. Airborne Freight Corp., 426 Mass. 629 (1998), states the rule as covering a bystander who “suffers emotional injuries as the result of witnessing the accident or coming upon the third person soon after the accident”. In Ferriter v. Daniel O’Connell’s Sons, 381 Mass. 507 (1980), the family first saw the injured worker at the hospital and the claim survived, because a “plaintiff who rushes onto the accident scene and finds a loved one injured has no greater entitlement to compensation for that shock than a plaintiff who rushes instead to the hospital”.

Q: I found out about the crash by phone. Do I have a Massachusetts emotional distress claim?

A: On the decided cases, probably not, however severe the reaction. In Cohen v. McDonnell Douglas Corp., 389 Mass. 327 (1983), a mother learned of her son’s death by telephone seven hours later, suffered angina attacks and died two days afterward, and the court held that “the manner in which she learned of her son’s death precludes the imposition of liability”, because her injury “did not result from a sensory perception of the injuries caused to her son or the injury producing event”. In Stockdale v. Bird & Son, Inc., 399 Mass. 249 (1987), a mother told four hours later who saw her son’s body the next day at a funeral home also lost. This is the fence that catches the most families, and whether a particular set of facts falls on one side or the other is a question for a lawyer looking at the actual timeline.

Q: I gave CPR to a stranger and could not save them. Can I bring a claim in Massachusetts?

A: Not for negligent infliction of emotional distress. Migliori answered that question directly, concluding that “a person who witnesses or comes upon the scene of an accident and voluntarily renders aid to a victim to whom he or she has no familial or other preexisting relationship, does not have a cognizable claim for negligent infliction of emotional distress under Massachusetts law” where the rescue fails and the rescuer suffers distress leading to physical problems. The reason given was the size of the class rather than the worth of the claim: a close relative belongs to a group fixed before the accident, while the class of rescuers is created by the event itself.

Q: Who counts as closely related for a Massachusetts bystander claim?

A: Massachusetts has never drawn the line. In Migliori the Supreme Judicial Court said “We have had no occasion to decide how closely a person has to be related to a third person directly injured by a tortfeasor in order to have a cognizable cause of action for negligent infliction of emotional distress.” Parents, spouses and dependent children are inside on the decided cases. Grandparents, adult siblings, stepchildren and unmarried partners are not addressed by any of them, so anyone answering that question with confidence is going beyond what the reports say.

Q: What if I thought it was my child but it turned out to be someone else?

A: The Appeals Court denied that claim in Barnes v. Geiger, 15 Mass. App. Ct. 365 (1983), where a mother watched a car strike a pedestrian she believed was her son and died the following day. The court held that “psychic trauma and resulting physical injury to a person who mistakenly believes a close family member to be the victim of an observed accident is beyond the reasonably foreseeable”, and acknowledged that drawing the line there was “in fair measure a pragmatic judgment rather than a systematic application of a general principle”.

Q: My family member died. Does the wrongful death statute replace my emotional distress claim?

A: No, though it does replace part of what people assume goes with it. Under Hallett v. Town of Wrentham, 398 Mass. 550 (1986), M.G.L. c. 229, sec. 2 “provides the exclusive action for the recovery of the damages it encompasses by the designated beneficiaries”, so the loss of the decedent’s “society, companionship, comfort, guidance, counsel, and advice” is recovered in one action through the executor or administrator, not in separate suits. Your own bystander claim is different. Cimino v. Milford Keg, Inc., 385 Mass. 323 (1982), held that because “emotional distress is a wrong to the plaintiff distinct from that done to his son and the statutory beneficiaries of the decedent”, “it is not a duplicative remedy” and is not preempted by the wrongful death statute.

Q: My spouse was badly hurt at work. Can I sue the employer for my emotional distress?

A: Generally no. M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 24 provides that where the employee has not given written notice preserving common-law rights, the employee’s spouse, children, parents and dependent family members are also held to have waived any right “against such employer”, and the statute names what it is taking: “including, but not limited to claims for damages due to emotional distress, loss of consortium, parental guidance, companionship or the like”. Note the words “against such employer”. If someone other than the employer caused the injury, such as a subcontractor, a driver or an equipment manufacturer, the family’s claim against that party is not covered by the waiver.

Q: Does the $2,000 medical expense threshold apply to a bystander claim after a car crash?

A: Nothing read for this article resolves it. M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 6D limits recovery of “damages for pain and suffering, including mental suffering associated with such injury, sickness or disease” in motor vehicle tort actions, and Dziokonski itself raised the possibility that the section constrains these claims, saying that even if it is not read as a limitation, “it may provide a reasonable guide in determining whether a physical injury is sufficiently substantial so as to justify recovery for negligently caused, emotionally based physical harm”. That was a suggestion rather than a holding, and no decision read here settles the question either way.

Q: How long do I have to bring an emotional distress claim in Massachusetts?

A: The ordinary tort period. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A provides that “Except as otherwise provided, actions of tort, actions of contract to recover for personal injuries, and actions of replevin, shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues.” Deadlines in injury cases carry exceptions and traps, and a claim added to an existing case after the period has run may or may not relate back, which is what saved the emotional distress count in Cimino.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Whether a particular person has a claim for negligent infliction of emotional distress, and what it is worth, depends on facts that only a lawyer reviewing them can assess. For advice about a specific situation, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS.