Grief, anxiety and depression follow disasters

From the Houston Chronicle:

The worst may be over for many Katrina evacuees, but for some the hardest part is just beginning: the emotional toll. Victims are struggling with large-scale trauma — grief, depression, anxiety, anger, guilt — and the next few months will tell whether the nation's overburdened mental health community is equipped to respond to the fallout.

The federal agency coordinating the nation's mental-health response estimates that as many as one-third of evacuees — or about 66,000 in Houston — could develop a stress-related disorder that requires professional help. Two in Houston who didn't get such help committed suicide during the evacuees' first two weeks here.

In Katrina's aftermath, more than one million people have been displaced, more than 400,000 jobs have been lost, more than 1,750 children are missing. Mental health specialists say they're staggered by the enormity of it all.

Click here for the rest.

I've mentioned how my and Becky's own evacuation has made me feel a weird empathy for the victims of Katrina: we hit the road in a hurry, with three cats, having no idea where we were going or what it would be like when we got there; we had car trouble and feared that we'd be caught out in the storm on the side of the road--uncertainty and fear ruled us for a couple of days. Of course, we got to come back to our home very quickly, with no damages, and all our creature comforts fully intact. We haven't even suffered a fraction of what the people of New Orleans have suffered. On the other hand, we've been depressed by the loss of our favorite city; we've been constantly in the presence of the people to whom the city belonged, but, again, our depression must be nothing like what they've had to deal with. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if the victims of Katrina have gone through even twice as much as I have, they've got to be hurting pretty badly in terms of their emotional lives. My suspicion is that many of them are hurting much, much more than twice as badly as us. Somehow the phrase "post-traumatic stress disorder" just doesn't do justice to it all.

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