Nervous shock, or psychiatric injury, represents one of tort law's most carefully policed domains because of the feared floodgates problem: if tort liability extended uncritically to all emotional harm, claims could multiply endlessly and become speculative. Indian tort law, drawing from common law principles and adapted through judicial reasoning, distinguishes sharply between two categories of claimants seeking compensation for psychiatric injury. A primary victim is someone who was themselves in the zone of physical danger from the defendant's negligent act, even if no physical contact occurred. If a person narrowly escapes being hit by a negligently driven vehicle, the sudden shock and trauma experienced may be compensable as nervous shock. The defendant owed this person a direct duty of care because they were exposed to foreseeable physical peril. The injury flows directly from breach of that duty. No additional gatekeeping mechanism applies—if the psychiatric injury was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the negligent conduct that imperiled them, liability follows. This category is relatively permissive because foreseeability of psychiatric injury in someone subjected to physical danger is high, and the causal link between breach and injury is immediate. A secondary victim, by contrast, is someone who witnesses harm befalling another person—typically a family member or bystander—but who was not themselves in physical danger. A mother watches her child struck by a negligently driven bus; a spouse witnesses a tragic accident at a factory caused by the employer's negligence. Secondary victims face a much stricter regime. Indian courts have imported and applied the control mechanisms developed in common law to prevent indiscriminate liability. These mechanisms include: (1) a requirement of proximity in relationship—courts generally recognize claims only where the victim was a spouse, parent, child, or in some cases a close bystander with an obvious familial bond; (2) a requirement of spatial and temporal proximity—the secondary victim must have perceived the accident or its immediate aftermath with their own senses, not learned of it later or through third-party accounts; and (3) a requirement that the psychiatric injury be a foreseeable consequence of the breach, assessed not merely in isolation but within these relational and perceptual constraints. These control mechanisms exist because secondary victims form a potentially limitless class, and courts fear indeterminate liability. The tests are not exhaustive, and Indian courts retain discretion to extend or restrict categories based on policy and justice, but they operate as strong filters. The consequences of establishing nervous shock liability are monetary compensation for medical treatment, loss of earnings, pain and suffering, and future psychiatric care. Remedies include damages under the law of tort for breach of duty causing foreseeable psychiatric injury. Defences available to the defendant include: (a) the injury was not reasonably foreseeable given the nature of the breach; (b) the claimant was not a primary victim and fails one or more secondary victim tests; (c) the claimant's own conduct, such as a reckless decision to enter a dangerous zone, breaks the chain of causation; (d) the injury would have occurred anyway from an independent cause; and (e) the claimant is suffering from a pre-existing psychiatric condition triggered but not caused by the defendant's negligence. These defences reflect the law's hostility to expansive psychiatric injury claims and its preference for placing some burden on claimants to demonstrate a tight causal and relational nexus. The position of nervous shock within Indian tort law sits alongside, but distinct from, physical injury claims. It applies the same foundational principles of duty, breach, causation, and damage, but imposes stricter foreseeability and proximity requirements at the stage of duty itself. This reflects the principle that psychiatric injury is less visible, more variable between individuals, and more susceptible to fraudulent or exaggerated claims than physical harm. Neighbouring concepts include negligent infliction of emotional distress in contract law (where a contractor's breach causes emotional harm without physical injury), defamation (where harm to reputation causes psychiatric distress), and assault or battery (where intentional acts cause fear and psychological trauma). These overlap at the margins but are distinct: nervous shock is unintentional psychiatric injury caused by negligence; defamation is reputational harm; assault is intentional creation of fear of bodily harm. CLAT examiners frequently distort this principle in predictable ways. A common trap presents a secondary victim scenario but omits one key control element—for example, a person learns of a horrific accident affecting their spouse only through a phone call the next day, clearly outside the zone of temporal and sensory proximity. The question frames the strong familial bond and invites the candidate to award damages on relationship alone, ignoring the perceptual requirement. Another favourite involves a primary victim whose psychiatric injury seems far-fetched or disproportionate—a person who was never touched but experienced extreme shock—and asks whether liability is automatic; the answer requires analysis of foreseeability in context, not mere presence in a danger zone. A third trap reverses roles: the defendant is not the actor but a person who failed to prevent harm (e.g., a security guard who failed to stop a dangerous altercation), collapsing the distinction between misfeasance and nonfeasance and importing occupiers' liability principles where they don't cleanly apply. Examiners also blur the boundary between nervous shock and negligent misstatement—where a defendant carelessly provides false information causing distress—or between nervous shock and breach of contract in consumer or employment scenarios. Finally, questions sometimes introduce comparative fault or contributory negligence in ways that distort the control mechanisms: asking whether a secondary victim's presence at a dangerous location amounts to contributory negligence confuses the question of whether they meet the secondary victim criteria with the question of whether they contributed to the injury itself.