How to describe loss of enjoyment of life in a WA compensation claim

Somewhere in your WA criminal injuries compensation claim, you will meet the phrase loss of enjoyment of life. It is one of the things the scheme can compensate you for, alongside pain and suffering, lost income and your expenses.

It is also the part of a claim that people undersell more than any other, because it is the hardest to see from inside your own life. This guide is about how to find it, and how to write it.

What loss of enjoyment of life means

In plain words, it is the gap between the life you lived and the life you live now.

Pain and suffering is about the hurt itself, the pain, the fear, the distress. Loss of enjoyment of life is about what the hurt took from your living. The Saturday sport. The dinners you hosted. The camping trips, the choir, the long walks, the crowded places you loved and now avoid. The parts of your week that existed purely because they made life good, and that the offence quietly removed.

The assessor weighs it as part of your overall award. And here is the thing to understand about it: no medical report can prove it. A psychologist can confirm a diagnosis, and an X-ray can show a break, but nothing in your file shows the assessor that Tuesday netball stopped, or that you have not hosted Christmas since. Your written account is the only place this loss exists on paper. If you do not describe it, it is not in your claim.

Why people undersell it

The losses arrived gradually, and you adapted to each one. You stopped the sport when the injury made it impossible, and within a month, not going was normal. You turned down two invitations, then the invitations stopped coming, and quiet weekends became normal. You gave up the market trips, the pool, the gigs, one at a time, and each time your life closed a little further around the gap until the gap disappeared from view.

By the time you sit down to write your claim, you are describing your life from inside its new, smaller shape. And from inside, it does not look like loss. It just looks like your life. That is why the most people often write the thinnest accounts of this head, and why finding the loss takes a deliberate look backward.

How to find what you have lost

Do a small piece of archaeology on your own life. It takes an hour, and it changes claims.

Open your phone's photo gallery and scroll back to the year before the offence. Look at what you were doing, where you were, who is in the frames, and notice what has no recent equivalent. Look at your old calendar if you keep one. Look at your bank statements from that year: the club fees, the gym membership, the dinner bookings, the gear you bought for hobbies that gather dust now. Lapsed memberships are loss of enjoyment of life with a paper trail.

Then ask the person who knows you best what you have stopped doing. They will have a list, because they watched it happen from the outside, where the shrinking was visible. Write down what they say, even the things that sting.

Finally, walk through a week from before, hour by hour, and lay it beside a week from now. The differences between those two weeks are the content of this part of your claim.

How to write it

Name the activity, its place in your life, and what stands there now. Not "I stopped socialising" but "I played netball every Tuesday for eight years, and I have not played since the offence. Tuesday nights are now spent at home." The specific version gives the assessor something with weight and shape. The general version gives them an adjective.

Count the diminished as well as the abandoned. Loss of enjoyment does not only mean things you stopped. It includes things you still do, but less often, with pain, with dread, or without the joy that was the point of them. You still garden, but in the way you do a chore. You still go to the footy, but you leave early because crowds are hard now. Still doing something is not the same as still enjoying it, and the difference belongs in your claim.

Use the before as the measuring stick. Loss can only be seen against what was there. A sentence or two about what your weekends, evenings and holidays looked like before the offence gives every loss that follows its true size.

Stay honest, and let small things count. You do not need to perform misery, and you should not. A claim gains nothing from exaggeration and risks a great deal. But small losses are real losses, and a page of true, modest ones weighs more than any dramatic summary. The assessor is reading for a life changed, and lives change in small pieces.

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Where the ten sections fit

Justice Draft's free guided form takes people through ten sections, and it was not written as a legal checklist. But lay the ten sections beside this head of compensation and five of them, between them, map loss of enjoyment of life almost exactly.

Daily life and routine holds the activities, the habits and the texture of your days. Relationships holds the company, closeness and social life that shrank. Spiritual and cultural wellbeing holds belonging, faith, community and country. Sense of safety holds the places and freedoms you avoid now, which is its own quiet loss of living. And who I was before this happened is the measuring stick that makes every one of those losses visible.

The other sections carry the other parts of a claim, the injury itself, the money, the fear at the time. So if you write your way through all ten honestly, your loss of enjoyment of life takes shape on the page without you ever needing to think in legal categories. The template was built to capture how harm actually lands in a life, and this head of compensation exists to recognise the same thing.

The practical frame

This piece sits inside a larger process. For how the WA scheme works end to end, see our plain-language guide to criminal injuries compensation in WA. For how to write the whole statement, section by section, see how to write your statement for a WA compensation claim. And if your claim is in another state, the same idea appears in most Australian schemes under names like pain and suffering or loss of amenity, so everything above still helps.

One deadline matters more than any writing advice: WA claims must generally be lodged within three years of the offence. The looking back can be done gently. The lodging cannot be left too late.

A gentler way to write it

Justice Draft's free tool walks you through the ten sections one question at a time, at your own pace, saving as you go. Write your answers, download your draft, and place it into your application, with your loss of enjoyment of life already where the assessor can see it.