When a child sustains a traumatic brain injury, the consequences are as much psychiatric as they are neurological. The depression, anxiety, PTSD, personality change, and behavioural disorder that follow are not footnotes to the cognitive damage — they are frequently the dominant source of suffering, the primary driver of family breakdown, and the hardest thing to put a value on. They are also the features most likely to be misattributed to pre-existing character, parenting, or ADHD, leaving clients without the diagnosis, treatment, or recognition they are owed. This webinar, delivered by a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist who acts as an expert witness, gives legal professionals a clear, practical framework for understanding the psychiatric sequelae of paediatric TBI and knowing exactly what to ask their expert.

This session will cover:

What TBI in children actually does — and why the psychiatric consequences matter most: from PTSD and depression to personality change and secondary ADHD — the psychiatric disorders that follow TBI, how they arise, and why they are so often missed or misattributed.

PTSD, depression, anxiety, and personality change after TBI: what each disorder looks like, how to distinguish it from pre-existing conditions.

What to ask a psychiatric expert witness: how to distinguish the psychiatric expert’s role from the neuropsychologist’s.

TBI, mental health, and the criminal justice system: why TBI and psychiatric disorder together markedly increase vulnerability in youth justice settings, the implications for fitness to plead and police interview reliability, and how psychiatric evidence can support sentencing mitigation.

The ‘mild’ TBI problem and persistent post-concussion syndrome: why one in four children has persistent psychiatric and cognitive symptoms months or years after a ‘mild’ head injury, why it is vastly underdiagnosed, and what this means for cases where the initial injury was dismissed as minor.

Family psychiatric impact and the risk of early settlement: the psychiatric impact on parents and siblings, why frontal lobe deficits often only emerge in adolescence, and why cases settled before this point may significantly undervalue long-term psychiatric harm.

Designed for solicitors and barristers working in personal injury, clinical negligence, family, and criminal law, this webinar delivers a psychiatrist’s perspective on one of the most diagnostically complex areas in legal practice — and gives you the clinical vocabulary and the right questions to make the most of expert psychiatric evidence.

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