General damages

General damages is the traditional name for what statutes now call non-economic damages or non-economic loss. There is no difference in meaning, and nothing turns on which term an adjuster or a lawyer happens to use.

The statutory definitions line up closely across states. California: subjective, non-monetary losses including pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental suffering, emotional distress, loss of society and companionship, loss of consortium, injury to reputation, and humiliation (source: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=1431.2.). Texas: physical pain and suffering, mental or emotional pain or anguish, loss of consortium, disfigurement, physical impairment, loss of companionship and society, inconvenience, loss of enjoyment of life, injury to reputation, and all other nonpecuniary losses (source: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/CP/htm/CP.41.htm). Ohio: nonpecuniary harm including pain and suffering, loss of society, consortium, companionship, care, assistance, guidance, disfigurement, mental anguish, and any other intangible loss (source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2315.18).

Pain and suffering is the best known member of the category, not the whole of it. Cornell's legal dictionary treats pain and suffering as the physical discomfort and emotional distress compensable as non-economic damages, and notes that in New York the phrase is used to sweep in all non-pecuniary damages including loss of enjoyment of life (source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/pain_and_suffering). Elsewhere the items are listed separately, which is why a verdict form can show several general damages lines.

The practical reason to keep the synonym straight is that the two words do different work in a settlement conversation. An adjuster is more likely to say "generals," a statute and a verdict form will say non-economic, and a damage cap statute will only ever be written in the statutory term.

The itemized list on a California verdict is longer than most claimants expect: past and future physical pain, mental suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, disfigurement, physical impairment, inconvenience, grief, anxiety, humiliation, and emotional distress (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/). Each is a separate compensable item, not a synonym for the others.

California courts have gone further and held that non-economic damages do not consist only of emotional distress and pain and suffering. They also consist of items such as the invasion of a person's bodily integrity, meaning the fact of the injury itself, along with disfigurement, disability, impaired enjoyment of life, susceptibility to future harm or injury, and a shortened life expectancy (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/). That is a meaningful expansion for anyone whose injury healed but left them more fragile than before.

Loss of consortium sits in this category but belongs to a different person. It is the spouse's claim for the lost companionship, affection, and household services caused by the injury, and it appears in the statutory lists of non-economic loss in California, Texas, and Ohio alike (source: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=1431.2.) (source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2315.18). Because it belongs to the spouse rather than to the injured person, it is valued as its own claim, which is what the loss of consortium estimate is for.

A useful test when you are unsure which column an item belongs in: ask whether the loss would show up on a bank statement. Missing your daughter's season because you could not sit through a game is a general damage. The cost of the physical therapy that eventually let you sit through one is a special damage. The same underlying injury generates both.

Anything with a dollar figure attached to it belongs in the other column. Medical expenses, lost wages, future care, property repair, and the cost of substitute household help are economic damages by statutory definition, no matter how much distress they caused (source: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=1431.2.).

Punitive damages are not general damages. Texas states that exemplary damages are neither economic nor non-economic damages, because they are awarded as a penalty rather than for compensatory purposes (source: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/CP/htm/CP.41.htm). This distinction has teeth at tax time, since punitive damages are taxable even when they arrive inside a settlement for physical injuries (source: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p4345.pdf).

The defendant's conduct is not an input either, however much it feels like one. Ohio directs that in determining an award for non-economic loss the trier of fact shall not consider evidence of the defendant's wrongdoing, misconduct, or guilt, evidence of the defendant's wealth or financial resources, or any other evidence offered to punish rather than to compensate (source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2315.18). How badly the other driver behaved belongs to a punitive damages claim, if one exists at all, not to your general damages figure.

Future harm you cannot substantiate is also out. To recover for a future item of pain and suffering, a plaintiff must prove they are reasonably certain to suffer that harm (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/). "It might flare up again" does not clear that bar; a physician's opinion that the condition is permanent does.

The governing standard is the absence of a standard, stated openly to the jury. California's instruction reads: no fixed standard exists for deciding the amount of these non-economic damages, and you must use your judgment to decide a reasonable amount based on the evidence and your common sense (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/).

Courts have said the same thing in stronger language. California authority collected under that instruction holds that compensatory damages may be awarded for bodily harm without proof of pecuniary loss, and that the absence of a market price does not make the injury non-compensable: there is no market price for a scar or for loss of hearing, so the only standard is what a reasonable person would estimate as fair compensation (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/).

The evidence burden is therefore different in kind from the burden on specials, not merely lighter. There is no document that proves a number. What the record has to establish is the nature, intensity, and duration of the harm, from which the fact finder derives the amount.

Your own testimony carries real weight here. California courts have held that the testimony of a single person, including the plaintiff, may be sufficient to support an award of emotional distress damages (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/). That is a genuinely low evidentiary threshold, and it is why adjusters attack credibility rather than arithmetic on this half of a claim.

There is one clear exception. Expert testimony is required where the claimed damages are alleged to arise from a psychiatric or psychological disorder caused or worsened by the defendant, because that subject is beyond common experience. Distress consisting of anxiety, shock, pressure, and fear that the plaintiff can describe themselves needs no expert (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/).

Because the number is derived from the nature of the harm, the record has to show that nature in specifics rather than adjectives. Objective medical findings do the heaviest lifting: imaging that confirms the injury, a surgical report, a permanent impairment rating, photographs of scarring. Those cannot be argued away the way a subjective complaint can.

The second layer is continuity. A treatment history without unexplained gaps supports the claim that the pain was real and persistent. This is also where the mitigation rule bites, though less harshly than claimants fear: a plaintiff cannot recover for harm the defendant proves could have been avoided with reasonable effort, but the burden of proving that failure rests on the defendant, and reasonable self-care can satisfy the standard where formal care was impractical (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3930/).

The third layer is the part most claimants under-build: evidence of the life the injury changed. Because compensation is proportioned to the intensity and duration of the harm rather than to any market price (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/), what persuades is concrete detail. A dated journal of symptoms and cancelled plans. Photographs before and after. A statement from a supervisor about tasks reassigned. A partner describing what they now do that you used to. Those records substitute for the invoice you do not have.

What weakens the category is predictable: inconsistency between what you told the physician and what you claim, activity captured on social media that contradicts the reported limitation, and description that stays general. "I was in a lot of pain" tells a fact finder nothing. "I slept in a recliner for eleven weeks because I could not lie flat" tells them the intensity and the duration, which are the two things the law says the award should be proportioned to.

Courts do not blend the two categories. California instructs juries that the damages claimed fall into two categories, economic and non-economic, and that the verdict form will ask them to state the two separately (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3902/). Texas requires the trier of fact to determine economic damages separately from other compensatory damages, and Ohio requires the jury to answer interrogatories specifying the total, the economic portion, and the non-economic portion (source: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/CP/htm/CP.41.htm) (source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2315.18).

Caps are the sharpest difference, and a damage cap is nearly always written against this category rather than the economic one. Ohio limits non-economic loss in ordinary tort actions to the greater of $250,000 or three times the economic loss found by the trier of fact, to a maximum of $350,000 for each plaintiff or $500,000 for each occurrence, while imposing no limitation at all on the economic loss portion (source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2315.18). The cap disappears where the non-economic losses are for permanent and substantial physical deformity, loss of use of a limb, loss of a bodily organ system, or a permanent physical functional injury that prevents the person from independently caring for themselves (source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2315.18).

Juries are usually kept in the dark about the cap. Ohio directs that the court shall not instruct the jury on the limit and that neither counsel nor a witness may inform the jury or potential jurors of it (source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2315.18). The jury returns a number, and the court reduces it afterward. If you are in a capped state, the headline verdict figures you read about may never have been paid.

Multiple defendants change the arithmetic too. California made liability for non-economic damages several only, so each defendant pays only the share matching their percentage of fault, while joint liability was retained for the objectively provable expenses and monetary losses (source: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=1431.2.). Under that framework, failing to sue one responsible party forfeits that party's proportional share of the non-economic damages.

Present value works in the opposite direction from what most people assume. Future economic damages get discounted to present cash value. Future non-economic damages do not: the jury is told to determine the amount in current dollars paid at the time of judgment and not to reduce it further (source: https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/3900/3905a/).

Adjusters do not evaluate general damages in a vacuum, because they have nothing to evaluate them against. The conventional starting move is to take the medical special damages and multiply by a factor of roughly 1.5 to 5 depending on severity, with more than 5 reserved for extreme cases (source: https://saclaw.org/resource_library/calculating-personal-injury-damages/). The theory is that heavier medical treatment signals a more serious injury and therefore more suffering.

That method, its tiers, and its worked examples are covered in the guide to how the multiplier is applied, and the pain and suffering calculator runs the arithmetic. This page deliberately stops short of repeating either. What matters here is the structural consequence: your general damages figure is usually derived from your special damages figure, so the two are not independent negotiating positions.

Two practical implications follow. First, under-documenting your medical treatment shrinks the general damages estimate by a multiple, not by the missing amount. Second, an offer quoted as one lump sum conceals which half is being discounted. Subtract your documented economic losses from the total and what remains is the implied general damages figure the adjuster actually applied. A personal injury calculator reports the two halves as separate figures, which is the breakdown an adjuster rarely volunteers.

Be aware that even a sound method is capped by reality. There is no law dictating the amount of general damages in an ordinary injury case, so the figure is a negotiation position rather than an entitlement (source: https://saclaw.org/resource_library/calculating-personal-injury-damages/), and it can be limited further by the at-fault party's policy limits or by a state cap on this category (source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2315.18).

Expect the opening number to be low. A first offer following a demand letter will almost certainly be significantly lower than what was demanded, and a very low first offer is sometimes a test of whether the claimant knows the claim's value. Decide privately on the minimum you would accept before talks start, and do not disclose that figure to the adjuster (source: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/negotiating-with-insurance-company-29765.html).

One last difference worth knowing before you sign. Proceeds for emotional distress or mental anguish attributable to a personal physical injury are treated like the physical injury proceeds and are generally not taxable, but proceeds for emotional distress that do not originate from a physical injury or physical sickness must be included in income (source: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p4345.pdf).